For me there were only Arty and Al and Chick and the twins snatched into nothing — and I with them — grinding, for relief, my teeth into powder.
The cats were lost but Horst made it. He took care of business while I was in the hospital. He brought me the papers to sign but he made the decisions. I didn’t object. He sent what he could find of Zephir McGurk home to his sons. He cleaned and polished the Fly Roper’s stork-shaped scissors before mailing them to the ex-wife in Nebraska. Horst was the one who identified Arty’s boiled body, no longer beautiful, in the dark char left when the big tank vaporized. He gathered the torn, soggy jar kin from the remnants of their shattered jugs and ushered them, with the rest of the Binewski dead, through what he called “decent” cremation.
The family living vans weren’t touched by the firestorm. Horst took out everything personal and then sold the vans. Norval Sanderson died in the Transcendental Maggot booth near Arty’s tent, but his van was safe. Horst was quick enough to get the papers, tapes, and journals out and away before the reporters got hold of them. He stored everything and rented a shabby room for himself near the hospital. He was occupied for months with the dismantling and bankruptcy of the Arturan rest homes. He visited me every day except Wednesdays, when he trekked down to the state mental hospital near Salem to visit Mama in her padded room.
He brought me from the hospital to a small rented room across a dark hall from his own.
“We might as well stay here, in Portland,” he said. “Every place is the same now.”
The Binewski name stank and drew flies. Horst gave my name as McGurk when he rented my room. “Zephir was a good man,” Horst told me. McGurk loved Arty so I kept the name.
Horst was the one who found Crystal Lil after the firestorm. It was a year or more before he told me about it. By then I had a job recording books for the blind. I had begun building a small life in the strange, stuck world. Horst had met a woman with strong thighs and a Siamese cat. He was moving in with her. He took me to McLarnin’s bar for our goodbye. Horst had a few extra jolts and then told me.
“I was looking for your papa. It was all over but the screaming. I came around the end of a van and saw him on the ground. He must have just stepped down from the generator truck when it blew. Your grandpa’s silver urn was lying in the gravel beyond him, battered. There was blood on it. I think it was Als.”
Horst couldn’t look at me. He wound his thick fingers in his grey mustache and glared into his glass.
“I knew he was dead and I stayed back. I couldn’t go up to him. I sat down in the gravel by the urn but I couldn’t touch that, either. Then, here comes your mama, calling ‘Al’ like it was suppertime. She was off her head. Out of it, you understand.
“She runs to where he’s lying and rips off her blouse — pulls her skirt down — hikes her underpants tight against her crotch. She’s saying, Al … broken … just completely broken … we’ll have to start over.’ She crouches over Al’s body, straddling his thighs, fumbling at his belt, opening his zipper, yanking those white jodhpurs down to his hips and talking softly. She settles herself over his limp penis and she rocks, rubbing her crotch against him, stroking his chest, not noticing the half of his face that isn’t there anymore — not noticing the handless stump of his arm smoldering, but rubbing herself slowly like a cat against him and running her hands inside his shirt against his chest hair and saying, ‘Broken … Al … after all our work … we’ll start again … Al … you and me … Al.’ ”
Mumpo was not quite three years old when he died. And you, Miranda, were two, stringing beads and eating vanilla wafers in Sister Lucy’s nursery. But you were nine years old before the doctors let me bring Crystal Lil home to the house on Kearney Street.
I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, “lived,” unless that place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires.
When I first stood in such a house I was struck by its terrible solidity. The thing had concrete tentacles sunk into the earth, and a sprawling inefficiency. Everything was bigger than it needed to be and there were so many shadowed, dusty corners empty and wasted that I thought I would get lost if I stepped away from the door. That building wasn’t going anywhere despite an itchy sense that it was not entirely comfortable where it was.
That was when I first recognized a need to explain myself. That was the time when I realized that the peculiar look on people’s faces when they saw me was not envy or hatred, but could be translated into one simple question: “What the hell happened to you?” They needed to know so they could prevent it from happening to them.
My answer was simple, too. “My father and mother designed me this way. They achieved greater originality in some of their other projects.”
For a while I told people this. I was proud of it. It was the truth. Only a few folks ever actually asked — little children, drunks, or people so old that they exempted themselves from the taboos of courtesy by pretending senile irresponsibility. I got interested. I’d throw the answer even when the question wasn’t voiced but was only lightly etched in the flesh around the eyes. I’d smile calmly and announce it to the kid at the gas pump, or the garbage collector, or a lady with a shopping bag at a street light.
Some, particularly women, would turn away as though I hadn’t spoken or they hadn’t heard me. They thought I was crazy. They didn’t want to encourage me. Next thing I’d be asking for money.
I worked on polishing my story and my delivery. To excuse them for wondering, to make them feel all right about it. I felt exhilarated by each explanation, but still they shut me out.
“Shit!” some would say. Or “Do tell!” The best I could hope for was “Born that way, eh?” Were they bored by it? Or embarrassed? Did they assume I was lying?
This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn’t understood before that anything about me needed explaining. It’s all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That’s where folks live. But it’s another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there.
Al always laughed at the stuck houses. He hauled out his only bit of scripture to deal with houses. “The birds of the air have their nests,” he would announce as though it were a nursery rhyme, “the foxes of the ground have their holes.” And he would raise one finger and jut his eyebrows forward in his teaching way, “But the son of man hath nowhere to rest his head.”
BOOK IV. Becoming the Dragon
26. NOTES FOR NOW: The Swimmers
I, the dwarf whose ears are separated only by an oozing hemorrhoid, am now being punished for sentimental collapse during my swimming lesson. It was the soft flab over Miss Lick’s neck that broke me. The firm way she has of pushing her jaw down into the cushions of her multiple chins as she smiles at me in the water. I had set myself up with a splurge of vanity for my own malignant resolution. Then the mere sight of Miss Lick’s neck tipped me off my perch. I blubbered all the way down and damned near gave the show away.
There I am, soaking in the green air above the water, keeping tabs on the lifeguard who is fluttering winsomely at a golden-brown boy wearing, apparently, three pounds of grapes stuffed down the front of his wet swim trunks. The room echoes flatly, and four little girls are huddled in the water on the other side of the pool, swearing to each other in whispers that they have seen me in the dressing room without my swim cap and my green-tinted goggles. They are assuring each other that I am as bald as a baby’s ass and that my eyes are bright red.