"Don't call me Role Model!" he snapped. "It's disgusting!"

Miz Z., the latest of Alma Witherspoons successors to command the administrative office, took a step back and hid her hands in her big sleeves. Arty winked at me and said he'd see me after the show. I gaped in surprise.

"Aren't you coming back to see the twins? They really want you!"

"No." He shook his head, smiling at me. "I'm not going to lay eyes on them for as long as I can manage."

"Arty! You r.e.c.t.u.m!"

Miz Z. hustled her novices off a few yards so they wouldn't be subjected to the interfamilial indecencies that the Great One allowed to his siblings. Miz Z. didn't know it, but she was going to wait a long time for her turn to get her toes nibbled off. She'd taught business-machine cla.s.ses in high schools for years and Arty liked the way she ran the office. Arty reached for his chair controls to follow them but I grabbed his ear and glared at him.

"They sent me to get you. What am I gonna tell them?" He blinked and looked back up the narrow staircase leading to the small room on top of the surgery truck.

"Well, I figure the Bag Man is still sort of unpredictable. Why don't you tell them not to struggle too much, not to fight him. I wouldn't want them to get hurt." He rolled away from me, and the three office ghosties scurried after him. He was off to another meeting, or a visit to the post-op wards, or an interview with some pipsqueak reporter.

I couldn't stand to go back to the twins. The idea of looking at them and telling them "no hope" made me sweat. I trotted through the morning cool. The sun wasn't high enough yet to fill the shadows between the lines of vans and trailers.

Mama was at the dinette table in our van, deep in one of her a.s.sembly-line projects. Twenty-six blue-spangled ap.r.o.ns and matching headbands for the redheads. Glittering cloth ran between her long white hands to its fate under the chattering needle of her sewing machine. I patted her elbow as I came in and she stretched her neck down, offering her cheek automatically for a kiss. A solitary blue sequin was imbedded in the makeup goo next to her nose. I kissed her and picked off the sequin.

"Those twins don't eat breakfast anymore?" she asked. "They worried about fat? I hardly see them." The needle gobbled at the cloth and Lil's voice murmured on as I went back toward the big bedroom at the end. The sliding door was half open but the window shades were drawn and the room was heavy with half-filtered heat and the suffocating weight of sleep laden with Lil's fleshy perfume and Papa's sweat and leather and tobacco. I went for the shelf on Papas side of the bed. Two books slid aside and I latched onto Papa's blunderbuss pistol. I looked at the safety catch and then stuck the thing into my skirt top, letting my blouse fall loosely over it. The barrel dug me in one spot and the b.u.t.t gouged me in another. The metal was heavy yet surprisingly warm. I went out past Mama but she didn't look up.

The twins were rehearsing. I could tell because the Bag Man was standing at the back steps of their stage truck. As I walked toward him I decided Arty had sicced the Bag Man on the twins just to get the big lump off his own back. The Bag Man started bending and bowing at me while I was still a ways off. I raised a hand and nodded and went up the steps and through the door.

The twins were alone. Another hour before the redheads showed up for f.a.n.n.y-kick practice. Dance, they called it. I saw the dark, gleaming heads bent over the matching sheen of the baby grand. At least they were staying calm enough to comb their hair and do their work.

"The whole cadenza should be written. I don't want any two-bit piano player f.u.c.king with improvisation in the middle of my work." That was Elly.

"All we have to do is place it at the beginning of the movement so that it's clearly an integral part." That was Iphy.

"I'd rather put rude remarks on the score. Here's Oly!"

They both looked up from the music paper, which was spread out on the rack in front of them, and stared past me, eyes flickering anxiously.

"Where's Arty?"

I went close to them, one hand reaching to touch Elly's arm, my eyes glued to Iphy's face. I couldn't look away from her.

When she saw what was in my face her eyes began to die. Their violet deepened to night purple, dull black.

"He's not coming."

Elly's hand clipped hard to my wrist. "Did you tell him? What'd he say?"

I wanted to be a street sweeper working nights in Rio, or maybe a florist in Quebec.

"He said the Bag Man is dangerous. Don't struggle. Don't fight him. Arty said he wouldn't want you to get hurt."

They didn't need to look at each other. They looked at me. Their four hands wandered into a complicated knot in their lap.

"Shall I go to Papa? Maybe Horst? Let me get them."

The twins were quiet for identical moments like one girl at a mirror. When they spoke it was with the echoing, simultaneous voice that came to them in their rare moments of unity: "Try, but it won't help." I nodded, digging under my blouse. "You remember how this works?"

I set the chunky gun on the shining wood of the piano. It lay there, quiet and nasty. They stared at it. I left before they moved again.

Papa was in the refrigerator truck counting cases of ice-cream sandwiches. I hollered at him that the twins wanted him and he handed his clipboard to one of the lunks who was loading the case. He came down off the truck with an arthritic creak that drowned out my fantasy of him rescuing anybody. I told him where the twins were and went off to visit Grandpa for a while.

Chick was asleep on the hood of the generator truck. His face was in the small green pool of shade cast by Grandpa's urn. The rest of his k.n.o.bby little body sprawled flat on his belly with his coveralls rucked up to his knees and his socks rumpled down over his sneakers. The skin on his smooth calves looked angry. He must have been asleep there for a while. I pulled his pant legs down to keep the sun off him. He twitched and his baby mouth smacked slightly at the air. The surgical sessions tired him out. The tinkle of music started on the midway. I could hear the whir of a simp twister starting up.

"Chick."

His eyes opened and his lips closed but the rest of him didn't move.

"Chick, you've got to help the twins."

He blinked and sat up.

"Did you know Arty gave them to the Bag Man?"

He nodded, stretching and scratching.

I slid over to where I could lean on the urn. "Wow!" Grandpa was too hot to touch.

Chick licked his lips. "Arty says the twins are getting married."

"They don't want to, Chick. They hate the Bag Man. Arty's just doing it to punish them for something. He's got no right to give them to anybody."

"He gave me to Doc P." Chick was calm, stating a fact.

"Not the same. You're just with her for a little while to learn stuff." He didn't answer. "I sent Papa over to see the twins but he won't be able to do anything. Not when it's Arty's idea."

"No." Chick lay down with his sweating face in the tiny pool of shade next to me. The metal hood was burning me through my clothes. A little wind came by and touched my ears.

"Is it nice wearing sungla.s.ses all the time? Is everything green?" He was blinking, getting ready to yawn.

"Chick! Chicky! You could sleep in the twins' van on that pretty sofa. Listen! If anybody tried to hurt them you could stop him. Chick!" His eyes popped open, a puzzled crease came into his forehead.

"Oly, I can't. Arty doesn't want me to. Arty already said that I wasn't to do anything. It's like when Mensa Mindy, the Horse with the High I.Q., was scared of the fire hoop and Papa said I mustn't help her. Whatever this is, it's like that for the twins."

The patient, solid explanation drove me, sliding on my belly, down the fender to the ground. He didn't call after me. I looked back once but he was curled up there on the hot metal with his face in the shade of Grandpas urn, sleeping.

Papa shook hands with the Bag Man. "You're going to be joining the family!"

The Bag Man grunted and gurgled and milked Papa's hand with enthusiasm.

"Fine! Fine!" Papa chanted, trying to pull his hand away and looking around for help. "My little girls in there? I'll just go speak to them! There! Excuse me! Thank you! Splendid to have you aboard! Talk soon!" and Papa escaped into the stage truck.

Iphy and Elly, listening frozen at the keyboard, shared a drooping weight of resignation in their common gut. "We knew it was no use," Iphy explained later.

"Ah, there you are, doves! My sweet birds! I just met your betrothed outside! Unusual fella!"

He was too loud, too fast. He flung his arms around them and squeezed them together, planting kisses on their pale matching foreheads. Iphy clutched his hands and spoke softly.

"Papa, please! Don't let Arty do this! Help us!"

"There, dreamlet! Of course I'll help! Nothing but the finest! We'll look at the calendar! Shut the whole shebang down for a day! Have a fabulous wedding!"

"Papa, listen! No. No. We don't want to marry him! We hate him! We're afraid of him! Arty is trying to force us - to punish us! Papa, don't let him do it!"

Now Papa, imprisoned in the four white arms, was wriggling to escape.

"Oh, my sweetlings! You're mistaken! Your brother talked the whole thing over with me early this morning. He means the best for you. Given it a lot of thought! This Bag Man - Vern, is it? Don't know him, myself. Seen him tagging after your brother, of course. Arty swears by him! Solid as Gibraltar! Loves you dearly! Do right by you! Natural fears, girlish hesitation! Even your mother! Thought of doing a bunk on our wedding day! Where would I be? I ask you!"

He was a large, determined man with many years of experience in slippery maneuvers. They couldn't hold him. He was still talking fast in the bombastic shorthand of the huckster as he sidled toward the exit.

"Papa," they chorused, "help us!"

"Adore! Adore you, my b.u.t.terflies! Your mother will be so proud!" and he was gone.

The twins sat back down on the piano bench. Iphy, who told me this later, says they were both thinking about the gun.

"We didn't really expect any help from Papa. But we'd stuck that gun into the storage s.p.a.ce in the piano bench. You know how the top lifts up? We were sitting on that gun and the idea of it seemed to crawl up inside us like a snake between our legs."

I hid, sulking in my cupboard under the sink with Mama's sewing machine gabbling a few feet away. Mama was not alarmed at my hiding in there with the door shut. She was glad of the company and talked fitfully to her hands, needing no answers. She was mainly preoccupied with, lunch and the way the meal symbolized the breakdown of the family.

"n.o.body shows up. They wander in three hours late, sniffling and expecting ... But I am not running a short-order house ... That Chick is ill and I know it and Al and all his pills and potions can claim to heaven that there's nothing wrong but you cannot fool a mother about her own ... drifting ... caught up in alien currents leading mercy knows where ... Next thing we'll get a telephone call and never even notice they left."

I was going over the list of possibilities. I wondered about Horst or a few of the old wheelmen, or even the redheads. Papa's cronies, Horst included, would never interfere with Binewski business. If I went to the redheads they might do something. I fantasized marching legions of angry women in high heels and bulging blouses. Then I imagined Papa standing in the dust of the midway with his arms crossed on his chest watching them come toward him and waiting for the exact moment to bellow, "You're all s.h.i.t-canned! Pick up your checks!"

What made me really sick was that I didn't want the twins to be rescued. I was glad Arty was mad at them, delighted that he didn't want to see them, c.o.c.k-a-hoop delirious at the thought of them utterly out of the running for Arty's attention. Big, festering chunks of my heart glowed with a dank cave light of celebration at their lovely talented lives trapped by the Bag Man.

The Twin Club girls who collected the Elly and Iphy posters, autographs, and photos, the duos of vapor-skulled gigglers who showed up in souvenir twin shirts and homemade twin skirts, what would the twin fans think of their glamorous idols being humped by the tube-faced Bag Man?

Gross! Gawwwd!

But I hated myself for that gloating. The pleasure terrified me. What if I were really a monster? What if they were really miserable and I didn't do my best to help? What kind of thing would that make me?

"One-thirty, dove!" called Mama. I crawled out of the cupboard and went off to the dressing room to grease Arty for the two o'clock show.

"He must have shut down all the alarms and had Arty give the high sign to the guards. Elly grabbed the gun when we heard the outside door. We sat there in bed waiting for the bedroom door to open. She was ready to use it, but he knocked.

"It was a shy knock ... three gentle taps ... and then the door opened slowly and he peered around it. He waved h.e.l.lo. I felt sorry for him. He seemed so shy. Elly waved the pistol and hollered that she'd shoot. But he just came in slowly, kind of bobbing and bowing apologetically with every step. He sat down at the foot of the bed with his veil puffing in and out and his one sad eye peeping at us. He took out his note pad. There was a message ready on the first sheet. He tore it off and handed it to me. It said, 'I love you. Please let me be tender to you.'

"While I was reading it he was writing another. The new note said, 'If you would rather kill me, it will be O.K.' Elly looked at that note and drew a bead on his head. His hands came up and opened his shirt at the throat. He pulled it open and patted his bare chest. The veil came untucked and I could see the plastic bag that hung there and a section of hose hanging down. Elly sat with her elbows propped on our knee, both hands aiming the pistol. She waited a long time. The Bag Man was very still, waiting. Finally she just dropped the gun and looked at me. She said, 'I wish he hadn't knocked. I could have done it if he'd just opened the door without knocking.' It was a lot worse for Elly than it was for me. She isn't used to doing things that aren't her idea."

Arty heard the shot and was clambering into his chair when I roared in.

"Mama's in there! With the twins! She just went in!"

"Quick! Push me! It's faster!"

Rushing, terrified, I jammed a wheel on the door and nearly pitched Arty out on his head. The cry came, high and thin. The twins were screaming as we leaped through their living room and rushed the bedroom door.

Mama stood calmly beside the big bed. The soft pink light from the gauze lamps made her look lovely. Her face was bright and tender. Her hair drooped charmingly. Her robe and fluffy high-heeled slippers were oddly tidy; the sash of the robe, for example, was tied in a neat bow.

The twins were hunched in one corner of the bed. Iphy was blinking dazedly at Mama and wincing as Elly heaved her private sector of their guts out onto the carpet.

The Bag Man lay dead and pantsless on the filth-smeared bed. His long naked legs looked bony and floppy at the same time.

"Mama," Arty said. She turned and nodded at us.

"I finally remembered where I'd seen him before." She looked down at the dark gun in her hands. "Oly, dear, this looks like your Papa's gun. Would you be so kind as to check the shelf next to my bed? And would you ask ... Oh, here's Al now."

I'd been asleep when I heard the creaking. Peeking out of my cupboard I saw Mama, white hair glowing in the moonlight, pa.s.sing through the twins' unguarded door. I was pulling on a robe to follow her when I heard the shot. I jumped to get Arty.

From the files of Norval Sanderson: Crystal Lil's story, as told to investigating officers (transcribed from tape): "I couldn't sleep. The moon affects me. I was sitting up in bed, looking out through the small window on my side. Al has always insisted that I sleep on the inside, and he sleeps nearest the door in every bed we've ever shared. It's his protective instinct. He feels that if an intruder were to come through the door he, Al, you know, could defend me. But I had lifted a corner of the curtain so I could look out.

"The moon throws a new and sometimes more attractive perspective on familiar objects, I'm sure you know. But that was how I happened to see this person approach the steps up to the platform. He strode past the window fairly close and the silver light of the moon on his shoulders let me really examine his gait. Gait and carriage, I always tell the children, are such powerful indicators of character. Suddenly I recalled where I had seen this man before, with his stooping head crouched down on his bent neck.

"I thank the merciful stars I was in time. My poor girls. But there, they'll be all right. Quite a miracle that the gun had fallen to the floor where it caught my eye. The Bag Man must have stolen it. Imagine threatening those helpless girls. I meant to strike him in the heart, but it was an awkward angle with him on top of the girls, naked below and his shirt unb.u.t.toned so it flopped and I couldn't tell where to aim, exactly. I had to shoot from the side or risk the bullet piercing him and going on to injure the twins. Al always loaded a soft slug, though, for stopping power. Al was right as usual."

Papa hunched over his hands as though his chest was ready to explode.

"Son, Arty, did you know that this was the guy who tried to kill you all? Did you know this was the guy from Coos Bay?"

Arty, grey-faced even under the warm gold light of his reading lamp, shook his head. "Of course not, Papa. We're very lucky Mama remembered him."

"Sweet, frosted globes of the virgin," breathed Al. "Imagine him haunting us all these years. I'll go batso thinking. All that time. All those chances. Me and my half-a.s.sed security."

Arty leaned against his chair arm, head drooping in fatigue.

"Well, Mama was just in time."

Elly's face, twisted by revulsion: "But she wasn't in time! He came when she pulled the trigger. He spurted like a c.o.c.kroach oozing eggs as it dies!" Iphy, calmly: "Normally we use a spermicide in our diaphragm, but we weren't ready for him and he wouldn't let us put it in."

The police wore green wool uniforms. They came in large groups. The ones who were not actually taking notes, photographs, or fingerprints, or asking questions, took the opportunity to stroll the colorless midway at dawn. When two patrolmen discovered the redheads' dorm trailers, three more cops sailed in to question these "important corroborative witnesses," who happened to be making large pots of coffee while wearing various interpretations of the nightie, negligee, shortie pajamas, and so on.

The coroner drove away in the back of the ambulance with the medical examiner and the Bag Man's body. The officer in charge of the investigation was a heavy, deliberate man with more cheek than neck, and small, steady eyes. He spent a long time with Crystal Lil in the sea-green/sky-blue living room of the twins' van. Lil sat, ladylike and calm on the sofa, while the plainclothes officer leaned over his knees on the chair in front of her, listening, nodding, taking notes on a small spiral-bound pad. Speaking very little, checking his ca.s.sette recorder occasionally.

When a uniformed kid came in to hand him a typed sheet, the big man read it slowly, folded it carefully, and tucked the thin paper into his breast pocket.

"Mrs. Binewski ... "

"Lily, please, Lieutenant."

"Thank you, Lily. We've just received confirmation from Oregon. The fingerprints match those of Vern Bogner, who was convicted of attempting to murder you and your children almost ten years ago. My report will say that Bogner was killed while attempting felonious a.s.sault, specifically rape. No charges will be brought. Oregon's been looking for this guy for eighteen months. He left his mother's custody and didn't report to his caseworker."

"Is this Utah?" Lil asked. "Are we in Utah?"