"No wonder your back's b.i.t.c.hing, getting pulled in different directions by Elly and the belly."

Iphy's pale face softened in pleasure. "Elly belly, weak as jelly."

"Arty thinks Elly's coming back some," I said.

"Does it make him feel better?"

"Do you think she is?"

"Sometimes. For a second. No more. That's good. Now work on Elly."

I inched slowly up Elly's arms and shoulders, probing, stretching, lifting, rotating but feeling how much of her muscle was gone into soupy flab like the dismal mush in her skull.

"Iphy?"

She blinked awake.

"Having that baby inside ... " I held Elly's neck in my fingers and felt the strong hammer of her blood. "Is it bad or good?"

Iphy blinked again. "Good. Inside me is good. The bad is outside."

"Arty's not happy."

"I know." Her tone was peculiar. Something familiar made me look up. She was absolutely twinkling. She pulled her lips flat, widening her grin grotesquely. She tipped her head back, let her eyes droop to slits. The colored beads of her eyeb.a.l.l.s slid from side to side and her voice rolled out in Arty's pompous, patronizing bell of power: "Happiness! Happiness, I tell you! Are you listening? Happiness? You Poor Paralyzed and Constipated Dung Chutes! Happiness is Not the POINT!"

I fell down laughing and Iphy laughed and we rolled giggling and kicking on the thick softness of the carpet, tangling hilariously with the flopping, laughless Elly until I hurt all over from laughing and kind Iphy stretched away from her dragging belly trying to breathe but was caught by the laughter again and again.

"Whyever," she gasped, hee-heeing. "However," she ha-ha'd, "could we love??" which set her off again and me with her, chortling, "love him!!" and screaming with the sunburst air of laughter and pounding our heels on the carpet and kicking our heels toward the ceiling until we both collapsed, exhausted, into feeble t.i.tters. Only Iphy had the strength at last to shout, "He's such a SIMP!" which set us off again.

I went to tell the Pin Kid that he and I were washed up. Kaput. Finite. He was lounging on his bed of nails while he worked some new spots around his belly b.u.t.ton with the needles. I hunkered beside him, watching him lift a flap of skin and shove the big pin through, then hold the flap in one hand, twiddling the k.n.o.b at the needle head idly as he waited for the thin trickle of blood to dry up.

"Ya know, Vinnie," I said, "I decided to stay with my brother." It was hard for me. A swallower girl was hanging freshly laundered curtains on the backdrop nearby. Some of the kids were throwing things into the air and not letting them hit the ground, juggling practice, with a scratchy tape blaring Mozart or something.

I watched the gem-sharp face of the Pin Kid absorbed in his own white skin. I looked hard to see if I'd hurt him. Maybe my whole life was set in that instant. I was a sixteen-year-old freak brat. If he'd said anything - a word might have been enough, "Don't," or a crease of the brow, a shadow of pain in his eyes could have seduced me. The pain I was looking for in him would have been my excuse, my motive, my escape tunnel to the world beyond the Binewskis.

But he half smiled in puzzlement. His eyes like the pebbled gut of a fast creek, bright and open and empty but willing to be full.

"Well ... sure," he said. As though he'd never imagined anything else for me.

"I mean," I said, frowning until my gla.s.ses slipped and my bare pink eyes popped into the light at him, "I mean always." I stopped because he was rolling off the nails and he'd forgotten to pull the big needle from his belly skin and the thin red blood was spattering his cut-off jeans. When he turned away from me, reaching for a shirt, I could see the rash of tiny pockmarks from the nail points reddening his lovely arched back, his curving graceful hump with the brightness of blood barely restrained at the surface of his white skin.

"Well, Oly ... Well, sure ... Hey, Arturo, he needs you." This Vinnie, the Pin Kid, was a nice boy. Even half-choked with disgust he tried not to hurt me.

That's when it clicked that the mechanics of my life were not going to run on the physics that ruled the twins or Mama in her day. If I bled it didn't mean what Iphy's blood meant. If I loved it wasn't the same as Iphy's love or the love of bouncy girls in the midway.

Arty had done his best to teach me this all along but I had seen him as a special case, not governed by the prosy gravity that held the rest of us. Vinnie, the Pin Kid, tried to keep me from knowing that he'd never thought of me the way I had thought of him. His kindness scalded me awake.

My new eyes saw the old things. He'd felt the needle in his belly as he'd pulled the shirt over his head. Now his big hands, cleverly knuckled, slid out the needle, dropped it into a tall jar of alcohol, dabbed antiseptic on the two small holes above his belly b.u.t.ton. He pulled the shirt down and tucked it into his red-spattered jeans.

"You're lucky, Oly," looking gravely out from his deep eyeholes. "My ma cried a lot just looking at me. You're right to stick by your family."

He stacked his props in his trunk and slid the nail bed out of the way. His legs were longer than me. His narrow shoulders nipped up near his tiny ears with the swirl of hump arching behind him. He moved as though he were all legs, a smooth bobbing in his gait that poured in through my eyes and settled in my right lung like a pool of ice. I got up while his back was turned and crept away.

From the journal of Norval Sanderson: Went with Arty this P.M. to watch the Pin Act. It's one of his new days off and he showed up in disguise, dark green blanket up to his neck. Green stocking cap, dark gla.s.ses probably borrowed from Oly. The guard was in civvies and there wasn't a novice to be seen. He rolled up to my booth and nodded and it was a full minute before I realized it was the Worm. If delighted him to fool me.

I'd been raving about the Pin-Cushion but it was the first time Arty had seen him. We stood in the back of the swallowers' tent and waited for the Pin.

We were in time for the swallowers finale. A bl.u.s.tering logger in front of us explained to his wife how the whole thing was collapsible swords and tricks.

"They always think the real thing is phony and that the tricks are the McCoy. Never stops amazing me," whispered Arty.

I told him the guy got his moneys worth feeling like he'd refused to be suckered. Feeling like he'd outwitted them. Showing off his worldly skepticism to his lady.

The old swallower did his Ta-Da with five hilts coming out of his mouth in a glittering bouquet and the skinny son did his with the lit fluorescent tube going down his gullet as the lights dimmed and the whole tentful went "aah" seeing that pale blue glow shimmering through the jagged shadows of his ribs.

"Clever b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, ain't they?" said the logger.

When the Pin came on, n.o.body left. The logger looked a bit pale but stuck it out. Arty was fascinated. "Nice timing, nice," he murmured once while the young Pin latched a big chrome hook into the permanent hole through his tongue and did a little ragtime step with a twenty-five-pound weight dangling on a chain from his tongue. The Pin walked up the blade ladder, danced on the bed of nails, then started with the pins and needles. Two of the kid swallowers were juggling fire steadily behind him and the Pin timed every move to build the heartbeat. He works with chrome knitting needles, ten and eighteen inches long. Impressive, through the thighs, through the skin of the chest. He's working a new place on his belly, and the blood trickling out and running down his pale skin to the loincloth is effective. He was quite a sight by the time he started punching the needles through his cheeks and lips. We slipped out before the finale so Arty wouldn't get caught with his chair in the crowd.

"Not from a show family? Sure?" he asked as we picked our way back through the midway crowd.

"Just the apple farmers."

"He could use a good talker to lead them through. That pantomime stuff is O.K. but a good talker would add a lot."

I didn't answer. He was thinking about Oly, young Olympia. I was surprised at the note of pain in his voice. As though he were afraid to lose her.

"I don't care. It doesn't do any good to care, so I won't." Chick was as dry and flat as a cow pie. Arty flicked his eyes at him suspiciously and then looked at me. We three were in the Chute for our secret meeting. The guards stood outside in the night mist while, in the deepest room, in the soft yellow glow of the lit jars that held our dead brothers and sisters, Arty told us what we had to do.

Chick slumped against a gla.s.s case. I leaned against him, watching Arty shift slightly in his chair, thinking. I tried to read the clenching of Arty's jaws and the tilt of his gleaming head on his thick neck.

"I don't usually mind what you think, Chick," purred Arty. His chin jutted at us, intent, "As long as you do your job. But this time you've got to understand. It's just us three in the pinch. Mama and Papa can't deal with it. All the guards, all the simps, the Arturans, the show folks, even Horst - they could turn in a flash. They all have their own machines to ride."

We listened. I could feel Chick's child bones vibrating against me, shaking to the tune of Arty's song. "It's just us three now. The twins have other things to deal with." Arty waited a beat to see if we'd react to that, complain or accuse. When we didn't he went on.

"You'll take three guards. I'll use the rest. By the time you're ready to start I'll be up there watching. O.K.?"

We nodded. Arty hit the start switch on his chair motor with a f.l.a.n.g.e of his right shoulder fin. "I need you bad, now. Don't f.u.c.k me over."

Chick held my hand as we walked through the dark camp. The big men moved silently behind us. Arty and his crew of fifteen guards had gone through the gate into the Arturan camp.

When we came to Doc P.'s van we stopped at the door. My mouth was dry and my hands were wet. Chick's fingers gripped my palm hard. We stood staring at the white glow of the big van in the moonlight. I could just make out the twined snake emblem with the communication grid caught in the open mouths of the snakes.

Chick sighed. "She's asleep," he whispered. He moved to the door, tugging me along as he opened it and climbed into the dark stench of antiseptic. The light went on and I saw the inside of Doc P.'s van for the first time in the years she had traveled with us. White and stark. No cushions on the metal benches. Chrome on the outsize sink. A metal desk against the wall, the white doors of cabinets glaring in the hard white light.

Chick moved surely. He'd spent chunks of his life here. The bedroom took up the end and the sliding door opened as we soft-footed toward it. "It's O.K.," Chick said. "Tell them to bring the stretcher." When I got back he was standing by her head, stroking her short grey-brown hair. I came close to look. Without her white wrappings and her glinting specs she looked soft and dissatisfied. Set grooves of disapproval curved down around her thin mouth. Her nose was shapeless, her skin thick.

"No wonder she wears a mask," I whispered. Chick laid his hand on her cheek. I noticed that his hands were getting big and bony on his kid-spindly arms. He trailed a finger across her lips. "She's always constipated," he said. The guards set the stretcher down and I stepped back to make room. Her cot was narrow, not built in, and it had a thin pad instead of a mattress. I peeked into the white closet as they took her out. It was full of books. The shelves filled the closet from top to bottom and the books were each wrapped separately in a clear plastic bag. I used two fingers to flatten the plastic across a book spine so I could read the t.i.tle. Some kind of surgical text. I checked a few more. All surgical texts. Chick looked in at me.

"That's what she taught me from. That's how she learned. The journals are in the cabinets up front."

Chick showed me how to wash up while the guards moved her to the operating table.

"Are you gonna lose your dinner?" he was looking at me sharply.

I hung on to his eyes. They were as chilly and soothing as Grandpa's urn. I giggled greenly, nodding. His mouth twisted in dry exasperation.

"Jeez. Arty just wants you here to make sure I do it. You can't really help anyway. Go over there."

He spun me with his mind and I knew it. I was moving into the latrine cubicle and falling to my knees. My stomach came all the way up and out, then snapped back like a frog's tongue. Then I was back at the sink with liquid soap covering my arms to the elbow and a white mask tying itself over my face and an itchy cap sliding down over my eyes. I giggled, watching Chick's hands under the rushing tap. "This is why you never have dirty elbows, hunh?"

His eyes grinned at me over his mask but he didn't say anything.

"Mama thinks it's weird that your fingernails stay so clean and you never get a crust behind your ears."

He was busy with the gloves. "Just sit on that stool with the back. You won't feel a thing."

But I was terrified. I thought she would wake up. I thought she would rise off the table roaring and take us in her thick hands and break us, and I thought Arty was sitting up above, looking down through the mirror in the ceiling, and he would watch Doc P. eat us and he would chuckle and come down and make a deal with her because that was what he'd meant to have happen all along. I was hanging on to the seat of my stool with both gloved hands, being scared that way, when suddenly I started being scared that she wouldn't wake up and that this other thing would actually happen. I opened my mouth to speak. "Argh!," I said, and my little brother Chick looked up at me, frowning between his mask and his cap, and I went to sleep.

"Why did I have to be there? All I did was get in the way and have to be put to sleep and fall off onto the floor in the middle of everything. I didn't help at all."

"Sure you did. You kept Chick from thinking too much."

"Why didn't you just put a clothespin on his nose?"

"Trust me, Oly. You were useful."

From the journal of Norval Sanderson: "In the night, while they slept, he went among them and took their swords and shields and stacked them in a ditch by the road. He bound their hands and feet as they lay dreaming. They woke lying in rows on the death cart and their first sight was the body of their leader spread and bound on the great wheel before their eyes, his many wounds dripping into the dust ... "

Which is the way all coups and counter-coups should be accomplished - fast and quiet with only the guilty suffering. I have to hand it to young Arty. He might have made a grand South American general. He went fast and hard through the Arturan camp last night, checking off the names on his "disaffected" list. Seventy people left the camp, escorted by the guards and handed a refund check for whatever they'd paid as an admission fee. Down the road they went, grumbling in their vans and station wagons. But, if they have any sense at all, they know they got off light and lucky.

If I hadn't been at the road myself to watch them go I might have speculated otherwise. There will certainly be rumors that Arty was less than fastidious in his techniques - that some were brutalized or even murdered. I might, I say, have considered the possibility myself. But the angry frustration on those faces wasn't fear. Miz Z. handed out the refund envelopes at the gate, and Arty parked in his chair by the Arturan Administration Office (the camper on the green Dodge pickup) to supervise - a guard beside him and others trotting up and away again for instructions or to report. Altogether an orderly and discreet process. When I wandered up to him he greeted me calmly. "Just quelling this little revolt, Norval," he said.

"What about the high priestess? Won't she fuss?" I asked. It seemed unlike the good doc to give up just because she'd lost her army. The primary weapon she held was her own surgical strike.

"Dr. Phyllis is being taken care of," he told me. A guard ran up to say, "That's the lot," and Arty headed for the operating theater. I tagged along but he made me wait outside by his chair with the guard while he went up. I stood around listening to the surgery generator hum. Eddie, the guard, sat down in Arty's chair and dozed. I wandered home, composing imaginary coverage of Arty's repression of the Great Lobotomy Schism. I didn't discover Doc P.'s fate until this morning.

I took a tour of the Arturan camp early and watched the holes in the line close up. All the gaps left by the deserting schismatics - tent s.p.a.ces, parking spots-that called attention to their emptiness like missing teeth have been sponged away. Miz Z. simply walked the lines and told everyone to move over and fill them. One fight broke out when a novice backed his scrofulous Volkswagen into one of the Harley sidecars, leaving a discernible dent. The other Arturans quickly subdued the irritated Harley owners and the rest of the morning proceeded in untrammeled harmony with much delighted gossiping: "That Arturo! He's a p.i.s.ser!"

"He showed 'em the road and told 'em they were welcome to it."

"A relief, really. They were disruptive, arrogant. Definitely interfered with my P.I.P."

"Them types wouldn't be happy anywhere."

"They'll be causing trouble in some hallelujah bin next ... "

Miz Z. came clapping her hands down the line around noon saying there would be a special Aqua Man service at 1 P.M. They all scurried for clean bandages, barking at the novices to get ready.

It was a short service with only the Admitted admitted. Arty came in to a tape of "The Ride of the Valkyries" and a roar of bubbles that subsided to reveal him floating in a hot-pink spotlight. He had a lot of gleam gunk on for the occasion and he made one of his more dynamic impressions. His talk was actually a chant-rhythmic: "She served us - she served us all - now we serve her," while an honor guard of one-fingered novices rolled out a wheeled cot with what remained of Doc P. ensconced in white satin. Chick tagged along behind. When the cot stopped in front of Arty's tank and the white spot hit it, Chick stepped up and peeled back the top sheet.

The crowd of amputees took a minute to catch on to who it was lying trussed like a leg of lamb. No mask. No cap. Only the spectacles glinting over her closed eyes were familiar. A short mop of grey hair spread around her face. She was still completely out. Those gla.s.ses were as useful to her as shoes, right then, but Arty, the clever little snot, knew the folks would need something to pin her ident.i.ty on. Arty waited while the murmurs started and spread. Finally somebody down front yelled, "Doc P.I" and the joint went up like an ammo dump.

When the roar died down, the spectral voice of Arturo, from the glowing tank above the cot, introduced Doc P.'s replacement.

"The Apprentice - the Student - the a.s.sistant. Now come into his own with his first act, this, the ultimate service to his teacher!"

Chick was charming-flushed pink and gold-his child body bobbing in an embarra.s.sed bow to the storm of applause. Funny how all the Arturans adore him. They're delighted that he's now the surgeon.

24.

Catching His Shrieks in Cups of Gold

I'd expected Chick to fume endlessly about nipping Doc P. but he surprised me. In the act he was businesslike. Afterward he was gently nostalgic. He stood very close to her until the ambulance took her off. She was going to an Arturan rest home near Spokane. Chick also blossomed, as Mama would say, in his new fame as full-fledged surgeon. Arty claimed not to be surprised.

"That blush-and-shucks game of his was a dead giveaway. The kid always wanted an act of his own."

An act he had. The Arturans treasured him. On his eleventh birthday he was in the surgery for fifteen hours straight. He had a talk with the nurse on the day he was named successor. That cool and efficient personage became his dog and priestess on the spot. She'd never cared for Doc P.'s bullying. The Arturans pestered him constantly. I'd laugh, seeing some patriarch in a wheelchair rolling madly to catch up with the barefoot towhead kid in the dusty coveralls, or the two hard-bitten motorcycle vets sitting on a trailer hitch so this scrawny runt of a kid could peer into their big spongy ears or lift up an eyelid to examine the exploded blood map underneath.

"Well," Chick confessed, "I don't need to touch them or even look at them to tell what's wrong. But they like it, so I do it."

They gave him no rest. Mama grumbled about his health and his lost childhood as she sewed baby clothes on her machine in the dining booth of the van.

"When does he climb trees? When does he sneak candy from the booths? Where are his friends to coax him into teasing the cats or giving Horst a hotfoot? They'll drive him into the ground. They'll suck him out of his natural growth. Look at his wrists and elbows! He's k.n.o.bby!"

Arty was pleased in a guarded way. He kept an eye on Chick in case delusions of grandeur should beset him, but privately Arty was convinced that with Chick as "The Knife" he was safe from revolutions. "He's a loyal little insect," Arty would grin. But Arty was intent on keeping the Arturan act solid. He toured the camp every day, supervised the office work, did his shows three times a week, conducted interviews, sent out advance men, advised Papa about the midway, and stayed away from Mama and Iphy.

Papa expected to a.s.sume Doc P.'s supervision of the twins' pregnancy but Arty slid Chick into the job. Papa sulked and spent more time drinking and playing checkers with Horst.

Iphy didn't bother to look up from her book when we came in. Chick sat on the floor and wiggled his toes in the carpet. I went my rounds with the dust cloth and made the bed and sorted the twins' laundry. Iphy read all the time. She liked mysteries. Every week's mailbag brought her a new lot of paperbacks. She took her daily walks and did her exercises grudgingly, wanting to get back to the book of the moment.

I came out of the bedroom with the laundry basket and looked at Chick. He hopped up and waved goodbye to Iphy as he opened the door for me.

"You're getting so used to doing things with your hands!" I said as we went down the ramp. He chirped, "Elly is coming back some." I felt myself swerving an inch above the ground, giddy and happy.

"Put me down!" My feet touched and my stomach dropped into place. "Are you sure?"

"Iphy knows but she's scared Arty will find out. Don't tell, Oly. Promise?"

"Are you doing it?"

We were near the laundry truck by then and Chick stopped and looked at me, startled. His hair was hanging down around his ears, I noticed. Mama would be wrapping him in a towel soon, making him sit on a stool in front of the van, and stepping around him with scissors as she prattled and he squirmed.