“Thick in the creases, please. I want to shine.”
I pushed the rolled flesh at the back of his neck and slathered a handful of grease over the smooth skin. He put his forehead against the bench and arched to pull the rolls out flat. I smoothed and rubbed and the sheen came up onto the back of his skull and crept toward his ears.
“Do you want the tips on your flippers?”
“I like it. The whole crowd breathes in when I go like this …” He spread his flippers and winked into the mirror.
I slid a hand under his chest and heaved. His back muscles rolled in cut slabs, every knob of his incredible spine visible as he bunched to help me. When he was balanced upright on his rear fins, I worked on his forehead and pulled the grease down onto his long eyelids and the flat cheekbones.
“I want a straight stroke of the white under each brow, down the nose, and under my lower lip. Not too blatant for the folks up close to the tank.”
I opened the jar of deli-white and spread his right fore-flipper. The pale glitter was already dry between his web creases. I painted brushfuls of soft gleam onto the fine fan of bones that were almost a hand sprouting from his shoulder. He flexed and spread and the light danced on the webbed flap.
The flippers on Arty’s hips were graceful. Nearly flat, twisting at their short joints like swans’ necks, smooth and powerful and extending with asymmetrical purpose. The little toelike thing that never had grime beneath its square nail could grip or scratch or turn a page. He twitched as I stroked on white, sending ripples through his whole body.
“Good. Go ahead and grease it now,” he said.
The undercoat caught the light in a subtle prism. When it was set, the final greasing had a sheen of its own and kept the white on even through the hour under water with Arty squirming his wildest. The white tipping and streaking were new touches. Arty examined himself in the mirror and his wide mouth wriggled from corner to corner.
“My, my. Won’t they just lick my jizz today?”
The sky above Molalla was aching blue but I walked from Arty’s tent to our van in the same air I’d sucked all my life. It was a Binewski blend of lube grease, dust, popcorn, and hot sugar. We made that air and we carried it with us. The Fabulons light was the same in Arkansas as in Idaho — the patented electric dance step of the Binewskis. We made it. Like the mucoid nubbin that spins a shell called “oyster,” we Binewskis wove a midway shelter called “carnival.”
It was noon and the crowds were building. Arty was in his tank holding elevation services for the Admitted in the big tent. Sanderson was hawking maggots in his elegant kudzu grammar. The redheads threw daring looks from every ticket booth and candy stand. Two dozen simp twisters did their best to shake, shock, and dizzy the change out of all the local pockets. I strolled down the midway, ready for lunch. I thought Crystal Lil was brewing Scotch broth for all her children.
But then I saw Lily in front of the twins’ van. She opened her long face and yelled, “Chick!” just as Chick pelted past me, elbows and knees pumping toward her. His white hair lashed behind him and I began to run. “It’s Elly!” howled Lil.
The bedroom door was open. The pink bed was filled with thrashing. One bare leg bent, beating its hard heel into the limp thigh of its mate. A long arm arced out of the snarling hair and flesh and whipped downward, clenching scissors.
“No!” said Chick, but the glinting fist landed and the heel went on kicking its other leg. “No!” Chick pounced on the bed and two frail arms jerked up out of the long black hair. The furious leg straightened and fell down on the sheets. Iphy’s red-smeared face tipped up between the raised arms and she lay quietly down beside Elly. The bubble pumping red from Elly’s breast flattened and then ceased. The two shining eyes of the scissor handles sat straight up in the shadowed socket of Elly’s left eye.
“No.” Chick reached for Elly while Lily, on her knees beside the bed, moaned, “Baaaby.”
“Elly?” said Chick.
I could see the thing on the floor in front of Lil, the bloody diapered heap of Mumpo.
“I can’t find her!” The creak of fright in Chick’s voice. A long thin tone whined from Lily’s open mouth.
“I killed her,” said Iphy calmly. She looked up at the ceiling from between arms stuck to the sheets by Chick’s mind.
“I can’t fix her!” Chick was crying.
“She killed my little boy.” Iphy’s voice was flat as Kansas.
“Mumpo,” said Chick and he lunged off the bed and saw the mess on the floor at Lily’s knees.
“Oh no,” Chick whispered. “I didn’t feel him go. Mumpo.”
Lily keened. “I did it,” sobbed Chick. “I brought Elly back.”
“Arty,” said Iphigenia. Then she died.
Rooted to the carpet, I stood and watched her go.
Chick whirled to look at her; his tear-slimed face broke. He threw himself on her, his hands grabbing her face. He jammed his face against hers, screaming, “No!”
Lil rocked on her knees beside the cooling pile of Mumpo. The high whine came and went with her breath. Chick’s face and hands were buried in Iphy’s dark mane. He said, “Arty.”
I broke for the door. Arty, I thought. Tell Arty. I hit the ramp as Chick passed me, his blond body hurtling barefoot to the dirt. I chased him. He stopped when he hit the midway. He stamped his feet into the sawdust, gathering himself, staring up the line to where the big tent loomed fifty feet above the booths and rides. “Arty,” he said, and I heard him through the wheezing music from the Mad Mouse as he stood, clenching his fists in the midway, stretching his neck with his eyes closed. No sign appeared around him. The air did not quiver. But silence came off him and the stretch of his neck cords made him old, and the veins blue and hard against his skin, and far down the line Arty’s tent, full of Arty and his cripples, blew upward, incinerating.
The white rocking air hit us before the sound. I heard nothing, but raised my hands against the rushing air, and the fire came, toppling toward us in falling blocks like the wave in a child’s dream, huge, though the torches were booths and tents no taller than a man could touch with his hand. It came billowing, scorching toward us, and the Chick, in his pain, could not hold himself but reached. I felt him rush through me like a current of love to my cross points, and then draw back. I, with my arms lifted, felt his eyes open into me, and felt their blue flicker of recognition. Then he drew back. He pulled out of my separate self and was gone. He turned away — and the fire came. The flames spouted from him — pale as light — bursting outward from his belly. He did not scream or move but he spread, and my world exploded with him, and I, watching, bit down — bit down and knew it — bit down with a sense of enormous relief, and ground my teeth to powdered shards — and stood singed and grinding at the stumps as they died — my roses — Arty and Al and Chick and the twins — gone dustward as the coals rid themselves of that terrible heat.
Many died. Many burned. Babes snuffed to grease smears in the blackened arms of their charcoaled mothers. Sudden switches, lean and brittle, had started as dancing children only seconds before. All the dark, gaping corpses, in their fire-frenzy ballet, flexed and tangled in the dreams of the finders. The firefighters and ambulance shriekers who had worked arson-struck tenements and the crashes of jumbo jets puked and retreated, or quit their jobs to grow lettuce, but still dreamed, after wading the ashes of Binewski’s Carnival Fabulon.