"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 pa.s.sed 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.

For me there were only Arty and Al and Chick and the twins s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 Al's."

Horst couldn't look at me. He wound his thick fingers in his grey mustache and glared into his gla.s.s.

"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 p.e.n.i.s 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 that 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 peoples faces when they saw me was not envy or hatred, but could be translated into one simple question: "What the h.e.l.l 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.

"s.h.i.t!" some would say. Or "Do tell!" The best I could hope for was "Born that way, eh?" Were they bored by it? Or embarra.s.sed? Did they a.s.sume 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."

B O O KI V.

Becoming the Dragon

26.The Swimmers

Ithe 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 d.a.m.ned 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 a.s.suring each other that I am as bald as a baby's a.s.s and that my eyes are bright red.

With my eyes closed I can feel the children looking at me. They have stopped their games for a moment in the shallow end where they can watch me. I too am at the shallow end, sitting on the steps in water up to my nipples. Miss Lick is plowing up and down the pool in her ponderous and dutiful laps. The children's eyes are crawling on me. If I opened my eyes they would smile at me and wave. They are just old enough to be embarra.s.sed at their normality in front of me.

Because I am Olympia Binewski and am accustomed to the feel of eyes moving on me, I turn slightly on my submerged seat and reach down as though examining my toes under water. This angle will allow the children a clear profile view of my hump. I have never claimed that my hump is extraordinary in size or conformation, but it is a cla.s.sic of its kind, rising in a clean arc and pulling my shoulders up, pinching my chest out in a narrow wedge. The top of the hump, if I bend at a certain angle, is as high as the back of my head. Now I will bring both hands out of the water and remove my goggles. There is some splashing from the children. They are impressed at the size of my hands on the ends of my short, thin arms. I smile and open my eyes so they can tell in the dapple reflections on the water that my eyes are a deep rose pink rather than red. But Miss Lick is standing in the shallow end, glowering down at the children. I can hear her harshness. "Are you swimming laps or fooling around?" And four little creatures do not speak but kick off from the wall and chase each other down the far lane of the pool to escape.

The light is pale green and moves on Miss Lick's enormous shoulders and chest. She turns and nods at me - a quick twitch of tension at her mouth that stands for a smile. She is telling me that she has saved me from the stares of idiots and that I am safe with her to guard me. Then she plunges back into the water and moves forward, beating the surface with the sound of a hiccuping cannon.

The children turn and come back but they won't dare stop at this end again. Miss Lick doesn't like children. She hates beautiful female children. These four ten-year-olds are long and absurdly slim, with clean faces. They are frightened of Miss Lick but not of me.

Maybe it's because I am so old. They would worry if I was their age and they could imagine being me. They tell each other that I was "born that way," which is rea.s.surance for them and comfort for me. Nothing could make me hurt them.

But they are wise to fear Miss Lick. She could lose control for an instant and grind them to paste.

Miss Lick is giving me a swimming lesson. She holds me in her arms and mutters, "Tip your head back, arch your spine. Good. Now kick from the hip."

Her face is big and serious, watching me carefully. Her arms and hands are warm beneath me. I lie on my back and squint up into her bulging face and know that she is the only friend I've ever had. We are in water that would be over my head if she let me go. I can hear the thrum of other swimmers beating the water around me. The light bounces off the walls and is broken by the water. Miss Lick holds me up. "Good, Oly," she says, and she smiles at me.

Miss Lick is six feet two and a heavyweight athlete. She is not quite 40 years old and has 20-inch biceps. I have 7-inch biceps. I am 36 inches tall. I weigh 64 pounds and I am very old at 38. My arthritis is actually 110. But Miss Lick is even older because she is closer to death. Miss Lick has her arm around the bomb that will kill her and she is d.i.c.kering to buy it.

"Kick!" she barks, grinning down at me. Suddenly the sting of grief spurts from my sinuses to my belly. This is all Miranda's fault, I tell myself in rage. If my daughter weren't such a fly-brained s.l.u.t I wouldn't be in this position. I could be a quiet, pleasant old dwarf, curling into a dry and sanitary death in my own blankets without ever having injured a soul. But here I am rocking in the arms of the creature I intend to slaughter. When I stop kicking and double up in pain, Miss Lick is worried.

"Water in your nose?" she asks, pumping her huge pillow hand gently against my hump. "Did you swallow some?"

Looking up through my smeared green lenses I see a roll of fat covering the artery in Miss Lick's throat.

When I refuse to go to dinner at her house Miss Lick wants to carry me up to my apartment and tuck me into bed. "G.o.d, I'm so thoughtless!" she groans as she wheels the big sedan through the dark streets. "I act as though you're a G.o.dd.a.m.ned mountain like me!"

"Not at all," I squawk, with my fingers clutching the soft leather of the front seat. "Not at all," I repeat, grabbing with one hand at the dashboard and the other at the armrest to keep from hurtling into the dark well of legroom as Miss Lick stops for a light.

"You're sure you don't want me to come up with you? I could make you some soup. I know you don't eat."

"Not at all." I fiddle with the door handle, and the door eases open at last and a crack of cool air slips in, dulling the hot reek of her chlorine flesh in the car. "I'm going to unplug the phone and crawl right into bed. I'm recording early tomorrow."

Her big hand touches my hump as I slide toward the pavement. "Let me give you a lift to the radio station in the morning," she urged.

"Not at all." I can barely think anymore. If I don't get away from her I will disintegrate and ruin everything.

"Thank you so much. I'll see you in the pool tomorrow evening," and I grab the car door with both hands and slam it on her goodnight and turn away, steering at top speed for the lobby entrance because she never pulls away from the curb until she sees me safe inside.

This building is new and Miss Lick could put a fist through my front door as easy as belching, which she does glibly. Miss Lick can belch every syllable of the name "Harry Houdini" on demand and enjoys being asked. Still, I lock the flimsy veneer behind me and then unplug the phone. I told her I was going to bed and I can't risk a busy signal if she rings to check on me.

It is garbage night for Crystal Lil. I have to go home. Taxis are expensive for moderately employed dwarfs who rent extra apartments, swim at private clubs, and fancy themselves as righteous a.s.sa.s.sins. I use the footstool to stare into the mirror over the sink in the all-new bathroom. Straightening my wig, adjusting my gla.s.ses, I smirk snidely at myself because it serves me right for being such a flabby clot as to lose my nerve. Getting all choked up with sympathy for Miss L. A good two-mile walk in the dark and cold will teach my knees and ankles a little respect for discipline and self-control.

Fatigue makes me giddy. By the time I get to the alley behind Lily's house, my head is floating several feet above my body and I have a bitter tendency to giggle. I can see myself and the view is pathetic. I don't dare use the front door in case Miss Lick is pursuing her surveillance hobby.

The old dwarf rolls up the cat-s.h.i.t dark stairs of the decrepit garage to get to the roof. Her feet hurt and her knees are pleading for a transfer to Bermuda. "Eeh," grunts the frog-faced albino. Her hip joints have gone past red-hot to a temperature unfamiliar even to the flap-t.i.tted hunchback. "Hunh," says the bald-headed mother of morons, as she stops to lean against the open door to the roof.

The air is grey, lit by a street lamp at the end of the alley. The garage roof is flat and attached at the rear to the tall wood house. The rain pops and silvers on the slimed pool of water that fills the center of the roof. The house fire escape sinks its feet in the roof tar. Miss Oly, the third or fourth Binewski child, depending on whether you count heads or a.s.ses, takes off her blue-tinted spectacles and rubs the sweat from under her bulging pink eyes and off the bridge of her wide, flat nose and then hooks the gla.s.ses back over her ears and settles them in place. Raising the entire flesh of her forehead and skull for lack of eyebrows, Ms. Binewski proceeds, with anxious care, to roll bowleggedly away from the cat stench of the stairway, around the edges of the rain pool, making for the first length of the cast-iron fire ladder. There she goes, humping up the damp, sooty rungs. She stops climbing and hooks her chin over the rung in front of her to rest for three breaths, thinking it may be time to get a cane. Or maybe a pair of canes hefty enough to help a burst toad of an elderly cretin up such flights of carpenterial fancy as those cat-slimed stairs in the garage without having to reach out and touch each sodden step with a hand.

She, this Oly, has reached the first slat landing of the fire escape and is hauling her thick carca.s.s onto it with her spider arms and resting again - or, more accurately, peering through the dirt-fogged window of the room that looks out of this a.r.s.e-alley backside of the n.o.ble West Hills, and, if those are tears puddling in the bottom of those wire-framed gla.s.ses she's wearing, then this flabby old douche bag will be too blind to stay on the platform and will drop and crack like a beetle on the garage roof, next to the ornamental pool.

No, she claims she's not crying, though her sinuses are trying to squeeze out through her eyeb.a.l.l.s. She is, however, feeling sorry for herself because this is "her" window and the big dusty room on the other side is "her" room and Oly misses it and would like to crawl in and shut the window and never leave it again, but she cannot because instead of a brain she has been blessed with a flame-purple hemorrhoid and she is in miserable, though voluntary, exile until her little project is finished.

There, is she crying again? Or is she only realizing that if she had washed that smog-clogged hunk of gla.s.s anytime in the last three years she might actually see her reading chair and her hotplate sitting on the cupboard and the cupboard doors that open into the blanket nest where she sleeps with the doors snugged shut and her knees tucked up to her chin. This failure in the service of transparency is disheartening to the delicate mucous linings of the amphibious Miss Oly. Picturing her cranky joints curled in her own warm nest causes further heat and discharge from her cherry-pink eyeb.a.l.l.s.

Quietly she slips the lock, pushes the window upward, snakes through into the warm dark, and feels the cushion-thick carpet beneath her brogans. She smiles her frog smile and considers calling a taxi for the trip back since surely she has punished herself sufficiently for what was, after all, an understandable weakness. Next time, she muses, I'll simply stick my hand in boiling water.

I go downstairs and yell, "Garbage!" three times at Lil's open door before she sits back from her magnifying-gla.s.s approach to the evening game show. Her white head moves, groping with ears and nose more than her sad, jellied remnants of eyes. Each time I look at her the white hair is paler and thinner, like spun gla.s.s above her mummy-grey scalp. "Garbage?" she screams. "Garbage!" I bellow.

She launches from her chair, leaping upward, neck extended, the tender underside of her jaw exposed in a flesh wedge aimed at heaven. Sailing the room, tacking from chair to table to cupboard, hand over hand, she locates her two wastebaskets and the tidy, plastic-wrapped bundle beneath the sink, clutches them to her breast, and turns toward the doorway, searching for me. I step in just far enough to grab the stuff. She opens her arms, letting it all go down to me. This is our Thursday ritual. To complete it, she will nod and turn away silently. I will lug the stuff to the junk closet at the end of the hall, where the big black bags of garbage from the roomers sit. Then I will drag all the bags out to the sidewalk, stacking them in the plastic barrels that sit there all week. That is all. We've done it this way for years. By the time I climb the stairs back to my room, Lil will be resubmerged in her struggle with the magnifying gla.s.s and the TV screen. Beyond the chant of "Garbage" we never speak. But tonight she cracks the mold. She follows me to the door of her room, leans there, waiting as I drag the big sacks past her. As I open the big front door onto the wet night, she calls out, "Thank you," in a clear, unbroken voice.

I look back. She is poised, her milk-veiled eyes aimed in my general direction, her head tilted back, listening. "You're welcome," I say, and she goes back into her room.

I climb all the way up to Miranda's door and knock. Then I hear a soft male voice laughing inside and turn away. She opens. "Miss McGurk!," smiling. "You're sent by fate to try munching Gorgonzola and artichoke-heart salad while listening to ... "

As she tries to pull me in, I try to pull her out into the hall. "Could I just speak to you for one moment?" She shrugs and steps out, folding her arms, looking down at me with her eyebrows pinched in concentration. "Something is wrong with Lily."

Her eyes spring open and she sets to move quickly, "Is she hurt? Shall I call an ambulance?"

Gratified, I pat her arm, "No, no. She's acting a little odd."

Miranda hoots. "How can you tell?"

"No. She's acting strangely. I can't be here for a bit. I have to work. Could you keep an eye on her? Tonight? Just stroll down and listen for her breathing. You can hear her in the night if you put your ear to her door. She has a heavy sigh in her sleep. And if you can't hear her, or if she sounds strange ... "

Miranda hoists her eyebrows at me in surprise. "Sure. I'll check on her. I'm not working tonight. Don't worry."

Nodding and waving, I retreat quickly. She stands looking after me. As I go down the stairs I hear the soft male voice call, "Miranda?" and then her door shuts quietly.

I stay in my room for a few hours, arranging the papers in the big trunk. At around eleven I hear Miranda on the stairs. Her footsteps pa.s.s down to the ground floor and pause for a while at Lily's closed door. Then she goes back up. I find myself smiling as I listen.

I go down myself an hour later. The wheeze and bubble beyond Lil's door is regular and strong. I use the wall phone to call for a cab and wait for it on the front steps.

I sulk all the way back to the tinhorn apartment. I want my own moldy room with its pale stench and its frail, maniac noise. The new building seems lifeless, incapable of decay. Its halls are narrow and pharmaceutically bright. Each floor is the same as all the rest. The only sound is the faint hum of the elevator. The orange carpet from the hall spills under my door, flooding the whole apartment. The rooms are low and square and it feels rented because I refuse to actually live here. In my home the air reeks of dust and jumbled layers of life, and it is dim unless you are right next to a window.

Here the telephone is white and has its own table. Where I live the phone is an ancient black-and-chrome wall box with coin slots and numbers scratched into its paint. It rings often but few people ever use it to call out. It is too exposed there in the grease-brown entryway. Whenever it rings, Lily answers, though it is never for her.

27.

Getting to Know You and Your .357 Magnum

What a bouncer she would have made! Shy as an egg, but so disguised. I can't help it. She charms me. To see her hunched over her plastic tray-chin shoved straight at the big screen, her paw pokes a fork in the air, and she laughs, "Hu-hu-hu," through her bulging cheeks.

"Smart little s.h.i.t, I'm tellin' ya!" she says after cleaning her cheeks with a gulp. "Lookit 'er drive that sucker!"

The young woman on the screen is bent over a complicated hunk of shiny machinery. The driving Miss Lick finds so admirable is a sure-fingered dial-twiddling and b.u.t.ton-tapping.

Miss Lick scoots back in her chair and lunges for another flabby forkful of limp turkey from her compartmentalized supper.

She loves this - carrying our Lickety Split food trays back through the discreet door in the big bathroom to her home-movie theater, perching on straight chairs with the trays on our knees, watching the screen full of Miss Licks girls. She adores the reruns, and nearly cries at the "before" footage, angry grieving for the misery of their lives before she rescued them. She is hypnotized by the surgery or treatment flicks, chewing slowly, nudging me with an informative elbow and a nod when a particularly smooth bit of scissor or saw work is goring its way across the screen. Now that she allows me to see these segments, she is anxious to impress me. But her joy is in the work shots of the "successes."

"Look at that! Know what she's doing? Reading the rings of rat-a.s.sed Saturn! Can you imagine? Six years ago the only rings she knew were for slipping over limp c.o.c.ks to make 'em rise!"

The young woman in the white coat reaches for the paper that is spewing from a printer. She turns toward us and the light to read. She smiles, a sudden grin of utterly cheerful mischief flashing out of her intense flesh.

I want to ask what it is that she hasn't got anymore. The lab coat hides her chest. Was it b.r.e.a.s.t.s? Two new figures appear - a plain woman and a spavined boy, twenty or twenty-one years old. They stand at attention in front of Miss Lick's girl as she speaks.

"Teaching 'em! See that? She's got these f.u.c.kers trailing after her!"

Miss Lick's big hand bunches and jabs my thigh sideways in hilarious friendship. "Eh? Eh?"

My tray flips forward, spewing goo, and she's on her knees choking with apologies as she plucks up the gobs and wipes up the smears. "Creeping Christ! I'm such a clod! Are you all right? Hey, I'll have a fresh new one for you in thirty seconds flat. Just sit. No, no, I'm going to."

She tears me up. I sit here laughing at her. She is a galumphing dugong, an elvish ox, a sentimental rhino.

"They're like my kids, all of them." She sniffs, her thick forehead creasing, anxious that I should understand and approve.

"Did you, no offense now, but did you ever wish you'd had kids? Not the man bit, but the kid bit? No? Well, you're right, I know it. You're right. But you want to make a difference. A person wants to feel as though they've accomplished something."