Arty's body floats straight out from the speaking tube, glinting mysteriously in the bright green water.

"Peace," says Arty, and the speakers above the tank lift his voice to the canvas peak of the tent roof. The bottoms of my feet say "Peace," and the padded bones of my pelvis whisper "Peace" to my bowels. A shiver pa.s.ses upward into my stomach, and my spine feels "Peace" like fear curling upward to my skull with my shoulder blades flinching around it.

"As I am!" shouts Arty, and my heart nearly stops with the shock of the sound in my body.

Arty pulls away from the face cup and wriggles toward the surface.

McGurk is hopping down the steps from the control booth. He is beside me now. Only slightly taller than me on his stumps, he is watching the wires as he rips the tape off my skin.

Arty's head appears on the rim of the tank, grinning at us. His face is pale and doesn't look as though it's connected to his body, which is golden, with slowly flexing flippers gleaming through the gla.s.s.

"That seemed a lot better!" chirps Arty. "That flat zone makes it even more effective!"

"Yes." McGurk holds the ends of all the wires together in one hand like the leashes to a pack of dogs. He examines the sheet of readout graph in his hand. "Yes. With just the upper and lower registers you can make them dance to whatever tune you like."

14.

The Pen Pal

It was Earlville, on the Gulf of Mexico. One hundred windless, muggy degrees. Mosquitoes drowned in your neck creases. The only industry in town was the federal penitentiary. The midway was jammed and the show tents bulged with sweating, stinking, bad-tempered drawls. It got dark but it didn't cool off.

The fat woman surfaced at Arty's last, hottest show for the day. She was young but her colorless hair was scraggled up into tight separate curls with so much scalp between them that she looked old and balding. She was crying as she stood up on the fifth tier of the bleachers and pushed her clasped hands out toward the tank where Arty was deep in his pitch.

"You, darling," said Arty, and the feel of "darling" rose up through her puffy ankles and through every b.u.t.tock in the bleachers. The crowd sighed. The fat woman sobbed.

"You feel ugly, don't you, sweetheart?" and "ugly" and "sweetheart" thrummed the crowd, and they all gasped and she wasn't the only one nodding.

"You've tried everything, haven't you?" said the bright floating spirit in the tank. "Everything," murmured the bones of the people.

"Pills, shots, hypnosis, diets, exercise. Everything. Because you want to be beautiful?"

Arty was building it up now, winding them tight.

"Because you think if you were beautiful, you would be happy?" He had the timing pat. Arty was a master of tone and timing. I leaned on the last steel strut of the bleachers in the aisle and smiled, though I'd seen him do it all my life.

"Because people would love you if you were beautiful? And if people loved you, you would be happy? Is it people loving you that makes you happy?"

Now the pitch drops a full octave into the groin groan. I can feel it even in the support poles. The a.s.ses on the seat boards must be halfway to o.r.g.a.s.m.

"Or is it people not loving you that makes you unhappy? If they don't love you it's because there's something wrong with you. If they love you then it must mean you're all right. You poor baby. Poor, poor baby."

The place was full of poor babies. They all sighed with tender sympathy for themselves. The fat woman's nose ran. She opened her mouth and cried, "Hoooh! Hoooh! Hoooh!"

Now Arty was gentle and low as a train a mile off in the night. "You just want to know that you're all right. You just want to feel all right."

And now he dives into the sneer. Arty's sneer could flay a rhino. "That's all you need other people's love for!"

The crowd is shocked into stillness. Arty grabs their throats while they're down and starts pumping the tempo.

"So, let's get the truth here! You don't want to stop eating! You love to eat! You don't want to be thin! You don't want to be beautiful! You don't want people to love you! All you really want is to know that you're all right! That's what can give you peace!

"If I had arms and legs and hair like everybody else, do you think I'd be happy? NO! I would not! Because then I'd worry did somebody love me! I'd have to look outside myself to find out what to think of myself!

"And you! You aren't ever going to look like a fashion queen! Does that mean you have to be miserable all your life? Does it?

"Can you be happy with the movies and the ads and the clothes in the stores and the doctors and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You can't. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them ... Now, girl, I want you to look at me and tell me, what do you want?"

Arty expected her to stay tongue-tied and blubbering so he could say the next line. That's the way it always worked. But this fat woman was so used to blubbering that it didn't slow her down. She opened her mouth wide and, though I've never really stopped hating her for it, I have to admit she was just saying what all the rest of the damp, wheezing crowd was thinking. She screamed, "I want to be like you are!"

Arty stopped dead still. His flippers froze and he began to sink slowly with his face pressed into the speaking mask and his eyes close to the gla.s.s staring out. There was sobbing in the crowd. Soft voices murmured, "Yes, yes." Arty was silent for far too long. Had he had a stroke? Was it a cramp? I started forward, ready to run around behind the tank and up the ladder. Then his voice came.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, that's what you want." And I could hear his breath go in, Arty's breath. Arty could control a mike and he never breathed so you could hear it.

"And that's what I want for you."

He didn't go on with his usual talk. He said that he'd have to think how to give this gift to her. He said they should all come back the next day - though he knew few of them would - because he would have something to say to them.

McGurk didn't know what to do with the lights. He was flickering a rainbow that made Arty almost invisible in the water. Finally Arty himself hit the switch that blacked out the tank.

The crowd started to trickle away as I ran to the back of the tank. Arty was already out on his platform and rolling in his towel.

"Arty, what's wrong?" I whispered as I scrambled up the ladder.

"Not a thing," he said. His face popped out of the towel and he grinned hugely, excited.

"Let's get over to the shower quick. I want to see Doc P. right away."

The woman who wanted to be like Arty came back the next day. The crew had just finished sweeping down the bleachers in Arty's tent and were raking the sawdust. The first show had gone as usual and it was an hour until the last show began.

I was next door in the ticket booth of the twins' tent snagging the take out of the till drawer into a bag, and punching in totals. A finger tapped the SOLD OUT sign in the barrel window in front of me.

"All sold out!" I hollered, and locked the cash bag.

"There's a dame in Arty's tent!" It was the crew foreman, shrugging at me. I took the cash bag and went with him.

She was sitting up on the fifth tier, where she'd sat before, but now she was the only one. The heat in the tent was heavy and dead. She had a shopping bag beside her and she looked ready to collapse. Her face was dark red. Her eyes were blood-spatter over yellow. She had a little face set into a big pillow of a head, and her arms and legs stuck out of a dress that would have been loose on a linebacker but looked like cheap upholstery on her. She was just sitting, staring at the unlit tank, listening to the gurgle of the pump that aerated and filtered the water.

I climbed up toward her. She looked at me, got a ripple of fear on her face, and grabbed at her shopping bag.

"Hi," I said. She clutched her bag and nodded, warily. She expected to be chased. I expected to chase her. "I work with this show, can I help you?" I stood still at the end of the tier and didn't go any closer. She flapped her jaws and then came out with a tiny shrill voice.

"I'm just waiting for the Aqua Man. I'm going to pay but there wasn't anybody to sell tickets. I'll pay when the ticket booth opens."

Her eyes ran over me cautiously. I was wearing one of the blue sailor dresses that Lil made for me. The blue matched the lenses of my sungla.s.ses. I wasn't wearing a cap so the woman's eyes spent a lot of time on my bare skull.

"I'll sell you a ticket right now so you won't have to worry about it," I offered, helpfully. I had a roll of tickets in my pocket, and I needed to make sure she wasn't going to pull an automatic out of her shopping bag and perforate Arty. She fumbled out money.

"You were here yesterday, weren't you?" I asked.

"He spoke to me," she said, counting out coins. "He said to come back. He would help me."

I sat down next to her and watched the heat rash on the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees and in the folds of her chins as she talked. She had got herself into a terrible jam, she said, and it had made her realize ... She was from Warren, Ohio, and her mother was a schoolteacher but had died last year. She took a photo alb.u.m out of the shopping bag and showed me a picture of a fat old woman.

"What kind of a jam are you in?" I pushed. If she had strangled her old mother I was going to have her escorted to the gate, heat rash and all. "It's a man," she said coyly. I couldn't help looking at her with suspicion. She bubbled into tears right away. I looked at the photo alb.u.m in her lap. She had drawn pink daisies on the cover. I figured she was the type who would doodle LOVE in big, loopy letters and dot her is with hearts. Her name was Alma Witherspoon. She was twenty-two riding hard on fifty-five. It seems she was a pen pal. She'd always been a pen pal. Seems she'd got the address of a twenty-to-life bank blaster a year or so before. He was up the road in the Earlville Federal Pen. She'd sent him a photo of one of the cheerleaders in her high school. After her mother died she moved down here so she could send him fresh cakes and cookies.

"We're in love," she said. It sounded like LOVE. "He wants to marry me!" she moaned. "And the warden has agreed! But I thought we'd do it by telephone and now the warden says I have to go out there and do it in his office and Gregory will see how I really look!" So she needed to see the Aqua Man. She didn't know anybody in this town. She had no relatives left to turn to. Her heat rash looked contagious. I gave her a show ticket and got away from her. "You just wait here for the show. n.o.body will bother you."

I took the cash bag to the safe and went over to help Arty get ready. I told him about Alma Witherspoon while I greased him. He lay on the ma.s.sage bench and nodded. His eyes were eager. He had a funny half smile the whole time.

"She's probably been spinning whoppers to her pen pals for years about being beautiful and popular."

"No relatives? No friends?" he asked.

"So she says."

"Good," grinned Arty. He stretched and rolled his back under my kneading fingers.

I was doing my talk in front of the twins' tent, "Siamese beauties linked in harmonious perpetuity ... " I always had a great time with "perpetuity" - it was a word you could play like a flute, rolling it up a full octave and whistling "Dixie" on that last syllable. The crowd was pretty good and most of them were already inside; the last twenty were shuffling in line for tickets.

That's when I saw Alma Witherspoon go by with two of the redheads who helped out in Arty's tent. The tall women beside her made Alma look even wider. She rolled along with her shopping bags and her purse and her photo alb.u.m all folded sweatily into different rash-angry creases of her dreary body.

Alma couldn't have made a penny as a pro. She didn't weigh as much as a single leg of "Eleven Hundred Pound Jocko!" or "Pedrita the Plump!" but she wasn't healthy. Jocko and Pedrita were the proudest people who'd ever worked for the show, according to Papa. Alma Witherspoon had the pride of a squashed possum.

" ... Twin musicians! Twin miracles!" I rolled on, watching the redheads gently guide the wobbly Alma up the ramp to the shower van parked behind the Games of Chance. She put her foot on the top and heaved lopsidedly upward as the door opened. I could see the startled jerk of Alma's wispy head as she saw the staunch white-clad figure in the doorway. Dr. Phyllis nodded, her white mask flashing glare into her thick gla.s.ses. Her white glove lifted, beckoning. Alma Witherspoon stepped into the shower.

"There is no shock. There is no danger of infection. Young Fortunato's techniques eliminate that entirely."

Dr. Phyllis watched Arty as she talked; her eyes swiveled behind her pool-deep lenses, probing for an argument that would change his mind.

Arty was looking through the gla.s.s window at the sterile infirmary where Alma Witherspoon lay sleeping, with Chick perched beside her on a three-legged stool. Chick was wrapped in one of Dr. P.'s white coats with the sleeves rolled up. His glowing face was bent toward the pillow. His eyes grazed lovingly over the sodden grey folds of Alma's cheeks and chins.

"Did you look at that chart I gave you? The healing rate on that spiral fracture was triple the normal expectancy for a patient that age ... Arturo? Are you able to comprehend what I am conveying?" Dr. P.'s thin, perfect diction entered the ear in a surgical manner. Arty, who had been absorbed in his view of the lumpy sheets and the doughy mound on the pillow, turned to her calmly.

"Doc, I know you can cut her down all at once. I know it would be more efficient. But I want her to have a lot of chances to change her mind." He turned back to look through the window again. He relaxed against the back of the wheelchair. His face was easy as he looked at the creature asleep in the next room. His mouth looked soft. There was a sleepy pleasure about him, almost peaceful, almost warm. There was, oddly, a look of Chick on Arty's face. Arty was happy. He was deeply happy and it was, in some way I didn't grasp, all because of moldy Alma Witherspoon having had all her toes cut off and then, when she'd recovered from that, having begged for the privilege of having her feet and legs nipped away as well.

Dr. P. and Chick kept Alma in the infirmary. Arty went frequently to park his chair in the observation room at one end and sit staring through the gla.s.s at her bandaged body lying on the second bed from the end.

Once a week, on Sunday mornings, Arty would flick on the intercom and watch Alma's face through the gla.s.s as his voice pumped at her from the speakers. She was always overjoyed to hear him. She called him "Aqua Man" and said she was fine and when could she have more of herself taken away? "I can't tell you what it means to me each time they clean a little more away, even a little toe. Once it's gone I feel what a weight of rot it was for me. Oh, Aqua Man, you are so kind to me. I thank the stars in heaven for leading me to you ... " and so on like that. She'd blubber away, a pen pal to the core. Her message was always How soon would they take her feet off? When would they take her hands? Could she, by a special dispensation from His Wateriness, skip the feet and have Doc P. just take off her whole legs one at a time? They were such a burden to her and she was in such a hurry to be like HIM.

Arty didn't talk about it but I could see it meant a lot to him. The whole thing had me fuddled. Why should this Alma make him happy? He'd never been that way about any of his visiting night girls - at least not by the time I brought in his breakfast the next morning. He was working harder than ever, reading more, vomiting nervously before each show - "To clear my head," he claimed. He schemed and planned with McGurk for hours every morning, playing with lights and sound. But I'd never seen him smile the smiles he smiled in those days, great soft openings of his face with no biting edges at the eyes.

We were up in Michigan when Alma started testifying. She was down to her nubs by then. Her legs were gone from the hip and her arms ended at the elbow. She looked better. Her front still flopped but she'd been eating Dr. P.'s Vegetarian Nutri-Prescription for months. Her skin had some tone and she'd dropped a few chins along with her limbs. More of her face was visible and her wispy hair seemed to have less expanse to drift away from. She was chipper, and she proved that "feeling good" about herself, as she called it, didn't make her any less irritating than being pathetic. There was a difference, though. Where she had been wetly repellent she was now obnoxious.

"I should say she might feel good about herself, the great lazy lump," said Lil. "Lying up there being fed and waited on. When does my Chick get to play? A child his age needs frolic and silliness, not mooning about spooning green gruel into that blob and worrying over her every minute for fear she might feel a twinge of pain! All my other children had time to play even though they worked every day."

I had nothing to do with Alma. To my recollection I never spoke to her directly after the first time in Arty's tent. But I watched her. To give them both credit, Alma was terrified of Doc P. and said nothing but yes'm and no'm whenever the good doc was around. And Alma worshiped Chick. But Chick was her painkiller so I figured her love for him had the same virtuous weight as an addict's for his drug.

Alma's testimony started in the Michigan factory towns. The redheads would wheel her out onto the stage beside the tank before Arty made his appearance. Almas twittering bat voice fed down through a b.u.t.ton mike on her white robe and McGurk bled a little timbre in before he shot it out through the speakers.

"My name is Alma Witherspoon," she'd begin, "and I just want to take one minute to tell you all about a wonderful thing that happened to me ... "

The rodent squeak chittered in her chest and her stump arms waved in the white spotlight and the bright green tank gurgled, huge, beside her on the dark stage. The funny thing was that it worked. By the time Arty exploded in a rush of bubbles from the floor of the tank, the folks in the stands were ready for him, dry-mouthed and open. And those certain few in the bleachers, those stone-eyed kettles boiling with secret pain, received her message. Those who had been waiting finally found a place to go.

That's the way it began. It was Alma "Pen Pal" Witherspoon who actually founded what came to be known as "Arturism" or the "Arturan Cult."

There were just a few converts at first, but Alma took over the process of organizing with a smug zest that made me want to kick her.

She was all humility and worship to Arty - a kind of "Kiss the Ground on Which Your Blessed Brown b.a.l.l.s Drag" smarminess. But with the converts she reigned as a high priestess, prophet, and mega-b.i.t.c.h. She originated the concept of "Artier than Thou." She ordered, organized, and patronized. The redheads, who had to wait on her and wheel her around in a replica of Arty's chair, hated her. Soon there were enough of the "Admitted" to give Alma a full-time staff. The redheads went thankfully back to balloon games, popcorn, and ticket sales.

Not that Arty was ever less than In Charge. Though he appeared only in his tank and did no trivial fraternizing, he knew everything. Most likely the whole thing in all its details was Arty's invention. He gave orders to Alma by intercom.

She sat in her commandeered trailer office chirping earnestly into the box on her desk and listening reverently to replies. Her method of pa.s.sing orders on to the lesser members was as snooty as that of any conveyor from on high.

She set Arturism up like a traveling fat farm for nuns. Though she herself had lucked onto Arty while flat broke, all who came after paid what she called a "dowry." Arty said, in private, that the sc.u.mbags were required to fork over everything they had in the world, and, if it wasn't enough, they could go home and get their ears pierced or their p.e.c.k.e.rs circ.u.mcised and see what that did for them.

The thing grew. Arty's fans - or the "Admitted," as Alma insisted on calling them - began to trail after the show in cars and vans and trailers of their own. From a half-dozen simple characters wandering the midway with white bandages where fingers or toes had been, there grew a ragtag horde camped next to the show everyplace we stopped. Within three years the caravan would string out for a hundred miles behind us when we moved.

Papa hired more guards and had the Binewski vans wired for security. After a month of phoning and looking and asking, Papa bought the biggest tent any of us had ever seen and set it up around Arty's stage-truck.

Dr. P. got a big new surgery truck with a self-contained generator. Two of the big trailers were converted to post-operative recovery wards. Chick was with Dr. Phyllis from early morning until supper every day. He was getting thinner and he fell asleep at the table leaning on Mama night after night.

"When does he play?" she would ask, her eyes blinking at the air directly in front of her.

Papa talked to Arty and Arty pa.s.sed the word to Doc P. Dr. Phyllis didn't like it, but two hours each day, one after breakfast and another before supper, Chick was ordered to play where Mama could see him. She started reading fairy tales to him during the morning hour. In the afternoon he dutifully pushed toy cars around the floor of the family van, making motor noises, so Mama could hear him as she made supper.

Having established the chain of command, having petrified two dozen finger-and-toe novices into doing all the paperwork, Alma shed her left arm to the shoulder. She spent hours crooning to herself on her infirmary bed with the screen drawn around her for privacy. Her voice grew frail and she stopped testifying.

She was replaced immediately. Dozens clamored for a chance to testify at Arty's shows. There were thousands' waiting, willing to pay, for the right to see and listen.

I was walking by when Dr. P. walked out of her big new surgery truck and heaved the plastic bag containing Alma's last flabby upper arm into an ice chest for Horst to dispose of. She dusted her white gloves against each other and nodded to me. "Well, that's finished," she announced through her mask. "It took a year and a half. I could have done the whole job in three hours."

After a while, Alma wasn't around anymore. Arty laughed when I asked about her. "She's retired," he said. "She's gone to the old Arturans' home to rest in peace." I thought he meant she was dead.

15.

Press