How We Fed the Cats

Al the handsomest man, looks bewildered and groggy over his first cup of coffee. His mustache is sprung and wild to match his sleep-jagged eyebrows as he peers around the table at us, asking, "What's this I hear about high jinks on the Mouse Rack with the wheelchair? Eh, dreamlets?"

We all grin dutifully and Elly does her "Oh, Papa!" routine to disarm him while Mama blearily hands around filled breakfast plates, and drags her kimono sleeves through the b.u.t.ter every time she reaches across the table.

I cut Arty's meat slowly while my chest fills with a yearning that would like to spill out through my eyes and nose. It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Can we blame the child for resenting the fantasy of largeness? Big, soft arms and deep voices in the dark saying, "Tell Papa, tell Mama, and we'll make it right." The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is. They claim strength, these parents, and complete sanctuary. The weeping earth itself knows how desperate is the child's need for exactly that sanctuary. How deep and sticky is the darkness of childhood, how rigid the blades of infant evil, which is unadulterated, unrestrained by the convenient cushions of age and its civilizing anesthesia.

Grownups can deal with sc.r.a.ped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appet.i.tes.

We need that warm adult stupidity. Even knowing the illusion, we cry and hide in their laps, speaking only of defiled lollipops or lost bears, and getting a lollipop or a toy bear's worth of comfort. We make do with it rather than face alone the cavernous reaches of our skulls for which there is no remedy, no safety, no comfort at all. We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

The shadow stayed in Chicks eyes, and a dimness, a kind of fog, settled on him. I think he never quite got over having hurt the frat goon. Chick was crazy like that. Something in his chemistry mixed up with the way the family trained him. He got twisted so that he was more afraid of hurting someone else than of being hurt himself, more scared of killing than of dying. In the numb, dumb way that he knew things, Chick understood Papa's disappointment and felt guilty for it.

Papa took to having depressed spells during which he was inclined to sit alone in odd spots with a bottle. High on a two-day binge, he ordered posters for a "World's Strongest Child" act, but he shelved the idea during the hangover. Sometimes Horst, or the twins or I, would make a suggestion to try to cheer him up.

"What about sports?" I'd ask. "What if a pole vaulter got just a tiny boost from Chick at the right moment and you happened to have a bet on the guy? What if a ball got a little nudge toward a goal line?"

But Papa would shake his head and pat my hump. "Oly, my dove, your grandpa told me long ago, and I should have remembered. He used to say, 'If you don't mess with the monkey, the monkey won't mess with you.'"

Al and Horst were going off on business for the day. Al told Chick to feed the cats and Chick, as usual, bit his tongue, turned pale, and nodded without saying anything.

Chick bit his tongue more than any kid I ever heard of. Sometimes Al had to use fire-eater's salve on the inside of Chicks mouth.

After Al left, Chick slid up to me at the sink where I was doing the breakfast dishes. "Come with me, Oly, please?" The dishes flew out of the sink in a silent, clatterless flock. They dipped through the rinse water and dried in the air as they jumped, ten at a time, to their places in the cupboard. I laughed and wiped my hands. Arty was holed up with a book and the twins were practicing piano with Lily.

"Sure," I said, "but how come? You've fed them lots of times."

His soft face rumpled lightly in worry. "I know. But I don't like it." His eyebrows went up in a peak of resignation. "I like the cats. It's the meat. I don't like moving it. Just come along, O.K.?"

Horst always parked the cat van near the refrigerator truck where the meat was kept. When he fed the cats himself, Horst would toss a quarter of beef out onto the ground, jump down after it, slam the truck door, wrestle the beef around by its lone leg and whack chunks off it with a huge cleaver. Horst fed the cats through the cage doors, but n.o.body else on the lot felt comfortable doing that. Horst liked telling stories about how unpredictable cats are. I always suspected him of doing it deliberately to keep people from messing with them. If that was his reason it certainly worked.

The sides of the cat van were hinged at the top and could be cranked up like awnings, shading the cages. There was steel mesh outside the bars, and the walls separating the paired Bengals and lions and leopards were inch-thick plates of steel. Al tried to get Horst to put clear plate plastic up instead of bars and the steel screen but Horst said it would ruin the effect. "People think big cats should be behind bars. And the screen gives them the feeling that they could get their fingers clawed off if they stuck them through. Besides, the cat smell is important too, and if I put plastic up I'd have to air-condition the whole rig."

When Chick fed the cats he dropped the meat through the ventilator slots in the roof. We stood outside the refrigerator truck and watched the big bolt lift and the door swing open. Chick reached over and took my hand. "Is this O.K.? I want to hold your hand while I'm moving the meat." He was looking pinched. "Sure," I said. A beef quarter floated off its hook inside the truck and wobbled out. It flopped onto the big chopping block. The cleaver came out of its slot in the trucks tool rack. Chick worked fast. The blade flashed upward five times quickly and six chunks of meat sailed through the air with exposed fat gleaming. The cats were coughing and spitting as the trapdoors over the ventilator slots lifted simultaneously. The chunks dropped through with a single thunk to the floor. Another quarter jumped out on the block and the door shut while the cleaver was rising and falling. Chick was squeezing my hand gently.

The cleaver dipped its square tip into the cutting block and stayed there while the chunks lifted, circled like c.u.mbersome crows, and headed slowly for the flaps in the roof.

"You could do it without the cleaver, Chick," I said.

"Yeah, but I'd feel the meat more. Can you feel it?" He was taller than I was and he looked down at me with such a serious intensity that I felt a small quiver of fear.

"Feel what?"

He frowned. Words never came all that easily to him. "Well, how ... dead ... the meat is."

I stuck my tongue out at the corner of my mouth and squinted at him through my sungla.s.ses. Anybody else in the family except Lily would be pulling something if they talked like that, trying to spook me so they could laugh at me later. Chick was so straight he was simple. He could never really understand the joke when the rest of us were telling whopping lies.

"No," I said. "I don't feel anything." He pursed his mouth and I heard the meat land inside the cages and the snarling of the cats. Chick looked so sad I knew I'd failed him. "I'm sorry, Chick."

He swung an arm over my shoulders and leaned his face down against my head. "It's okay. I just thought you might feel it if I held your hand."

"s.h.i.t," said a clear voice behind us. We wheeled together as though we were the twins. It was one of the red-haired girls. She shrugged her round shoulders at us through her peac.o.c.k shirt and laughed nervously. "I just never get over how you do that, Chick," and she waved gaily and teetered away on her tall heels.

We watched her go, Chicks arm still around my shoulders, my arm around his waist. For one instant my eye escaped and I could see us as we must have looked to the redhead. Two small figures, one bent and distorted, shielded by cap and gla.s.ses, and this slim, golden boy-child, several inches taller, holding the dwarf close while chunks of meat sailed over them in the air. I hugged Chick. His peach cheek rubbed my forehead and nose. I wondered how he did move things and, while that wondering was creeping into my skull, I realized that I had never wondered about it before. Had any of us really wondered? Even Al and Lil? Or had we all been so caught up in the necessity of training him and protecting him and protecting ourselves from him and figuring ways it would be safe to use him and finding out exactly what he could or couldn't do that we never got around to wondering?

"Chick," I said to his fine yellow hair, "how do you move stuff?" His head came up slowly from my shoulder and he looked surprised.

Then his face focused. I was thinking how ridiculous never to have asked him. He started to blush. He let go of me and pa.s.sed his hands over his ears as though he knew I was making fun of him. "Oh, you know," he said. The cleaver levered itself out of the chopping block, flew to the sterilizer hose hanging from the refrigerator truck, and danced in the white gush from the nozzle. The hose stopped and the cleaver leaped toward the truck door, which opened just enough to let it in. Then the door closed and I knew the cleaver would be settling into its slot. Chick was bright pink now.

"No, I don't know, Chick. Tell me."

A small rock by the truck wheel began to spin in place. It flipped over, still spinning, then hopped onto its side and began to roll in a tight circle. The equivalent, probably, of another kid scuffing his shoes or twiddling his own ear in embarra.s.sment. He was my little brother, of course, so I got impatient. "I'll pinch you, Chick! Tell me how you move stuff!" The rock lay down quietly.

"Well, I don't really. It moves itself. I just let it." He looked at me anxiously while I chewed on that and found it unsatisfying. I shook my head. "Don't get it."

"Look," he turned me toward the cats. The side of the van lifted and the prop poles slid into place so I could see the cats in the shade. They were all eating, standing over the meat, wrenching it, or lying with chunks between their paws, fondling it.

"You know the water tank at the back?" said Chick. As I watched, the small taps over the troughs in each cage opened slightly and trickles of water flowed. One of the Bengals leaped at its tap and began batting the stream with its paw. "Water always wants to move but it can't unless we give it a hole, a pipe to go through. We can make it go any direction." The tap that the Bengal was playing with suddenly opened wide and a gush of water splatted into the big whiskers. The cat jerked back and then lunged forward, pressing his whole face into the heavy spray, twitching his ears ecstatically. "If you give it a big hole," said Chick, "a lot comes out. If you give it a pinp.r.i.c.k you get a slow leak." He was struggling to make me understand. I watched the tiger play and felt a thickness between my ears. "I'm just the plumbing that lets it flow through. I can give it a big path or a small one, and I can make it go in any direction." His anxious eyes needed me to understand. "But the wanting to move is in the thing itself." We started off toward the big tent.

"Did I help?" I asked.

"Sure," he said.

Arty, wheedling from the sofa, called, "Chick, I'll bet there's a lot of that roast beef left over from dinner. I sure would like a sandwich made out of that beef, with mayonnaise and horseradish. What do you say? Will you make me one?"

Chick, with a comic book under his arm, having worked for hours at other people's jobs and looking now for just an apple and a visit with Superman - this vegetarian Chick, who will eat unfertilized eggs and milk but never (no, please don't make him) fish or fowl or four-legged beasts or anything that notices when it's alive and talks to him about it if he touches it - this Chick knows Arty is being mean, and will force him to move the meat rather than using his hands and a knife, and says, "Sure, Arty, white or whole wheat?"

He tries. He gets the plate of beef from the refrigerator and casually grabs a knife from the drawer.

"Chick!" snaps Arty indignantly. "You're not gonna use a knife, are you?"

Caught, Chick admits, "I was gonna move the knife."

But Arty roars, "Drop all that norm s.h.i.t! Why did Papa give you that gift if you're going to p.i.s.s it away like a norm? Move the meat. Move the meat!"

And so precise leaf-thin pages of beef separate themselves from the pink roast and arrange themselves with a swoop of mayo and a flip of horseradish on a dancing pair of homestyle whites, and they all come together on a pretty blue plate that glides out of the dish rack to give them a ride over to where Arty is picking his teeth with a fin and watching.

"There you go," says Chick.

"Thank you so much," says Arty, who is perfectly capable of making his own sandwiches if there is n.o.body around to do it for him. Arty clamps a fin on the sandwich and takes an enormous bite, watching Chicks face as he chews. "Dullicious!" he mouths around the mess.

"Good. I'm glad." Chick smiles and steps out of the van and walks around behind the generator truck, where he vomits painfully and tries to think of something besides what the cow said to him as he sliced her.

They were fighting and their door was locked. The thumping woke me. I burst out of my cupboard thinking of elephants or earthquakes. The thin paneling of their cubicle room thonked toward me a fraction of an inch. I could hear them gasping. I ran to their door. The k.n.o.b wouldn't turn. The early sunlight slanted in through the window over the sink. A huge body slammed against the door on the other side. They'd wake up Al and Lil. I slid Chick's door open and his huge eyes were waiting for me. He was afraid.

"Help me," I whispered. "The twins are fighting."

He rolled out of his blankets and grabbed my arm. His hand was wet.

"Unlock it."

He looked at the doork.n.o.b. It turned. The door opened. They were rolled in a knot on the bed with spider elbows jerking out and in, a flailing leg whacking a heel into a thin, pajama-clad back. Their breathing was short and loud and a hand came out of the mess, pulling a long skein of black hair up into the light of their small window.

"Hold their hands." I nudged Chick. Two hands spread out against the pillow and a fist landed with a smack and a squeak. "All the hands! All!" I snapped. Four arms splayed in the air away from the twisted bundle of pajamas. A leg swung back for a kick and then froze.

"Can you hold them?"

Chick nodded, looking at me. His eyes had crusts of sleep in them. Elly's face lifted out of a ma.s.s of black hair - a red scratch across her forehead. She drew back on her long neck and shot forward, whooshing out a phtt of air as she spit into the tangled hair beneath her.

There was no hiding it from Al and Lil. The scratches and bruises were so visible that the twins couldn't do their act for four days. They were sick and sore. They lay in bed with their faces turned away from each other all that day. Al and Lil were very upset.

"You must never do that again! You must never fight with each other!" The old incantation poured in shocked desperation from the parental mugs. The twins refused to explain what it was about.

Chick was helping me drain sewage tanks that afternoon. We were both glum. We stood and watched the gauge on the pump that emptied our van's tank into the tanker truck. I kept thinking about what they'd looked like when Chick had opened the door. Like a thing that hated itself.

"They always bicker," I said.

Chick nodded, watching the gauge dial. "But they were really trying to hurt each other." Chick's head fell forward, his chin nearly touching his chest. The back of his neck was so thin and golden, and his tawny head was so big above his skinny shoulders. Seeing him hit my lungs like an ice pick through the ribs. He was pretty.

"I wonder what it was about?" I murmured.

Chick sighed. His head wobbled. "Iphy said his name in her sleep," he said.

Lil made Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Chicken for dinner. She was rubbing lemon juice over her hands to get rid of the garlic smell while we all sat around the table waiting for the oven bell to sound.

The twins were excited about something, whispering to each other. Al was talking about an old road manager he'd run off the midway twenty years before. The guy had shown up again that day looking for a job.

"Vicious G.o.d, Lil! He looked eighty years old! He looked like the grave had spit him back up, disgusted!"

Lil tsked over her lemon-juice hands. Arty watched the twins. Chick and I leaned on Papa from opposite sides, leeching his warmth.

Lily was dishing out the chicken when Iphy finally spoke up.

"We have a new turn for our show!" Iphy glowed. It had to be tricky. Iphy always did the talking if a "No" was possible. It was hard for anybody to say "No" to Iphy.

"We do a standing vertical jump onto the piano top and spring off into a synchronized-swim dance number in the air. We fly out over the audience and back while the piano goes on playing the 'Corporal Bogwartz Overture'! Doesn't that sound great? We practiced this morning! We'll use pink floods and three pink spots to follow us over the crowd. Do let us, Papa! Chick can handle the whole thing so easily. He knows the music already. He learned it in two sessions! It takes exactly one and a half minutes and it'll be our finale. He can just run in during the last five minutes of each show, stand behind the screen, and be finished when we touch the stage for the bow! Please, Papa, Mama? Come and see it after dinner; you'll love it!"

Chick was hiding his face behind Al s arm. Arty's eyes stayed on Lil's big spoon, lifting out chicken and putting pieces on plates.

Al was laughing. "What a picture! Wouldn't that flatten 'em? Hey, Crystal Lil! How about these girls? Sharp?"

"Flying," Lil murmured. "Mercy."

Elly was pink with eagerness, her hopeful, fearful eyes fixed on Arty, who said nothing. He rocked slightly in his chair, seemingly interested only in the food that was acc.u.mulating on his plate with the help of Lil's spoon.

It never happened, of course. Arty quashed it. If the outside world tumbled to it, or even suspected it was not a trick, we'd drown in power plays for Chick. Stay with the straight path of what we were each gifted with ... Did we think Al hadn't done enough for us, that we had to monkey with his work? Iphy was disappointed but willing to understand. Elly never said anything about it.

We probably looked sweet, the twins and I, in our blue dresses under the shady apple trees, with big bowls in our laps, snapping green beans on a summer afternoon. But the apples on the tree were gnarled and scabby and the twins' glossy hair and my sunbonnet covered worm-gnawed brains.

"Arty wouldn't hurt anybody." I was lying vigorously as I snapped away at the smooth-skinned beans. "You're the one, Elly. You're jealous of Arty when he's just trying to take care of family."

"Oly, you know Chick would be floating in formaldehyde if it looked like he was going to steal any of Arty's thunder by being a big success." Her hands ripped the beans to pieces, dropping the tips and strings into one bowl and the usable chunks into another. Iphy's hands did the same task lightly, delicately.

I pushed on doggedly through my beans. "Arty still thinks Chick can be useful."

"Sure," Elly sniffed. "As a workhorse and a slave. Chick can save us a lot of money. It takes ten men five hours to put up the tops that Chick can put up in one hour by himself. And Chick's pay is a pat on the head."

Iphy sighed, "You should be kinder."

Elly muttered at her own fingers, "I'm just taking care of you and me. That's all I'm thinking about. He hates us. He's selfish."

"Not selfish! Scared! He's scared all the time, Elly! You know it!" Iphy's hand lifted in fright, demonstrating Arty's terror. I shrugged off goose b.u.mps, thinking, I'm scared too. Because I know Arty. I know him better than either of you do.

"Let him be a preacher. Let him have all those creeps sucking around him. They'll puff him up. But he'd better leave us alone, and Chick too. And you can tell him that, Oly. There, take all these beans to Mama!"

"Be nice, Elly," I pleaded. "Just be nice."

"I'll be nice," she muttered dangerously. "You'd both let him cut your throats before you'd complain!"

Without any of the family taking much notice, Arty became a church. It happened as gradually as the thickening of his neck or the changing of his voice. From time to time one of us would remember that things hadn't always been that way. It wasn't that Arty got a church, or created a religion, or even found one. In some peculiar way Arty had always been a church just as an egg is a chicken and an acorn is an oak.

Elly claimed that it was malice on Arty's part. "He has always had a nasty att.i.tude toward the norms. Iphy and I like them except for the hecklers and drunks. They're good to us. Papa tends the crowds like a flock of geese. They're a lot of work and a bit of a nuisance but he loves them because they're his bread and b.u.t.ter. Mama and Chick - and you too, Oly - you three don't even know the crowds are there. You don't have to work them. But Arty hates them. He'd wipe them all out if he could, as easy as torching an ant hill."

"Truth" was Elly's favorite set of bra.s.s knuckles, but she didn't necessarily know the whole elephant. If what she said about Arty was "true," it still wasn't the whole truth.

Arty said, "We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise. Even a rats-a.s.s dwarf jester got credit for terrible canniness disguised in his foolery. Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanct.i.ty."

The first time I remember him talking like that was one very rare night when he had an ear infection and couldn't do his act. I stayed with him while the rest of the family worked. He sat on the built-in couch in the family van surrounded by the popcorn he'd spilled, the kernels getting smashed into the upholstery as he bounced around talking and dipping his face into his bowl of popcorn and nipping at hot chocolate through his straw. I laughed because he had b.u.t.ter smeared around his eyes as he pumped this piffle at me.

I was crushed when Arty ousted me from the Oracle. Originally, I had been the one who sorted through the question cards and actually went on stage to press the face of the chosen card against the side of the tank while Arty hovered, bubbling on the other side, to read it and then shot to the surface to give the answer. Then Arty decided he wanted a redhead to do it. He had them parade in a giggling line outside their dorm wearing shorts and bras so he could choose the best figure. He said the crowd would have more respect for him if he was waited on by a good-looking redhead. "They'll wonder if I'm balling her, decide that I am, and think I must be a h.e.l.l of a guy if this gorgeous gash puts out for me even though I'm so f.u.c.ked up. If it's Oly waiting on me, they figure it's just birds of a feather."

I still took care of him after each show, but for a long time I sulked and ignored the act.

The Aqua Boy changed again. For a while, he answered only generic questions distilled from the scrawled bewilderments and griefs that piled up on the three-by-five cards. Then he stopped answering at all and just told them what he wanted them to hear. Testifying, he called it.

What Arty wanted the crowds to hear was that they were all hormone-driven insects and probably deserved to be miserable but that he, the Aqua Boy, could really feel for them because he was in much better shape. That's what it sounded like to me, but the customers must have been hearing something different because they gobbled it up and seemed to enjoy feeling sorry for themselves. You might figure a mood like that would be bad for the carnival business but it worked the opposite way. The crowd streaming out from Arty's act would plunge deeper into the midway than all the rest, as though cantankerously determined to treat themselves to the joys of junk food and simp twisters to make up for the misery that had just been revealed to them.

Arty thought about the process a lot. Sometimes he'd tell me things, only me, and only because I worshiped him and didn't matter.

"I think I'm getting a notion of how to do this. O.K., a carnival works because people pay to feel amazed and scared. They can nibble around a midway getting amazed here and scared there, or both. And do you know what else? Hope. Hope they'll win a prize, break the jackpot, meet a girl, hit a bull's-eye in front of their buddies. In a carnival you call it luck or chance, but it's the same as hope. Now hope is a good feeling that needs risk to work. How good it is depends on how big the risk is if what you hope doesn't happen. You hope your old auntie croaks and leaves you a carload of shekels, but she might leave them to her cat. You might not hit the target or win the stuffed dog, you might lose your money and look like a fool. You don't get the surge without the risk. Well. Religion works the same way. The only difference is that it's more amazing than even Chick or the twins. And it's a whole lot scarier than the Roll-a-plane or the Screamer, or any simp twister. This scare stuff laps over into the hope department too. The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous. Bad! Well, I'm working on it. I've got the amazing part down. And the scary bits are a snap. But I've got to come up with a hope."

Arty had the advance men make up special flyers to hit certain churches. "Refuge!" they blared. "Arturo, the Aqua Boy!" and then a list of our dates and sites. Though Arty never mentioned anything resembling a G.o.d, or an outside will, or life after death, church groups started showing up. In the grim blasted regions where the soil had failed or the factories were shut down, whole congregations would drift through the gates, ignoring the lights and sights of the midway, and find their way to Arty's tent. They paid their price and sat numbly in clumps on the bleachers waiting as long as it took for his show to begin. When it was over, they would leave the grounds together, ignoring everything.

"Too poor to play," Papa said.