But looking at her by herself, I saw how beautiful my mother was then, and still, and how you had to look at what was holding the cigarette to realize it was a foot and not the expected hand, and how she made hands seem like an unfashionable waste of time.
“Most beautiful armless girl in the world,” said Uncle Plazo. Even at thirteen I was rather touched. Then he said, “She can do anything, she can wind a watch, she can paint a picture, she can fire a gun,” and I realized he was repeating my mother’s pitch. But when I looked at him, his face was fond and thoughtful.
The next day, we took Uncle Plazo to the grocery store. He offered to drag the little red wagon we always used when my father was unable to drive us. My mother had to slow down her usual straight-ahead stride: Uncle Plazo walked like a wind-up toy, moving quickly but not efficiently. He was easily impressed by the cars that drove past; by strangers, street signs, movie marquees; by radios playing from windows. He might as well have been from the jungles of ancient Mexico, so unaccustomed did he seem to everyday suburban life.
The sides of Ma’s body were expressive, and useful, and now she caressed us with a hip to show she was interested, but in a hurry. She’d carefully sewn up the sleeves of her dress, to show neither skin nor loose flapping fabric. I imagined she’d always done that; she’d been born without arms. My father explained to me that my mother’s mother had probably been sick during her pregnancy, a virus. It could have been so small she’d never even noticed she was ill.
Inside the store, Plazo seemed amazed by the shopping carts, and pushed ours, looking even shorter behind it since he had to reach up; I stuck the little red wagon sideways inside the basket. “Oranges,” he said, admiring a pyramid of them. “Will you look at that? Will you just look at those oranges?”
“Would you like an orange?” Ma asked.
“Hell no,” said Uncle Plazo. “Can’t stand the things. Zleeno liked ’em, but not me. Look.” He pointed to an abandoned bottle nestled in the bananas, and he carefully read off the label, “Salad dressing.” He laughed.
As we went through the store, it became increasingly obvious that his wonder was to a large extent politeness. “What do you know,” he said. “Bacon. Ham.”
“What would you like to eat?” Ma asked.
“Oh, nothing for me,” he said. “But thank you for your concern.”
When we checked out, Ma said, “Do you want to pay, Plazo? Steve, pull out my wallet for Uncle Plazo.”
I fished out her wallet from her skirt pocket and handed it to him. He seemed alarmed at the sight of the money. The girl rang up our groceries.
“That’ll be eleven eighty-two, please,” she said.
Uncle Plazo pulled out a handful of bills and offered them. She smiled at him.
“You’ve given me too much,” she said.
“Really?” He sounded delighted, as if he had just discovered in himself a great capacity for kindness.
The clerk wrinkled her nose and laughed. “New in town, aren’t you,” she said.
“Plazo is visiting us,” Ma said.
“Where from?” the girl asked. “Mars?” She handed Uncle Plazo the change.
“No, not from Mars,” he told her. “I once knew a man from Mars.”
“Oh, did you now,” she said. “That isn’t hard to believe.”
“Come on,” said Ma. “Let’s get going.”
“He has unbelievable strength,” said Uncle Plazo, as usual slipping into the present tense of the bally. “The man from Mars can lift two ordinary earth men.”
“Uh-huh,” said the girl. “I’m sure he can.”
Ma was standing by the door. “Come on, men,” she said.
I lifted the grocery bags off the counter into the red wagon and offered the handle to Uncle Plazo.
“The man from Mars,” he said to me outside, “was from Kentucky. I always liked him.”
After our trip to the grocery store, Uncle Plazo wanted to take walks all the time. When I got home from school, he was waiting for me, dressed in the blue jeans and plaid shirt he now lived in: the world’s smallest lumberjack. Sometimes he wore his serape, too, even though it was June and warm. He was always cold, as if he really believed he was from a tropical climate.
“You know—” he said, stepping out into the street.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Not yet,” I said. “There’s a car coming. We’ll wait.”
He nodded. “I always thought Zleeno would make it to a hundred. Didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know him.” The car passed and we started across.
“But didn’t you think he would? Make it to a hundred?”
“I guess,” I said. “A hundred’s pretty old.”
“It is pretty old,” he said. “But it’s possible. Plenty of people make it to that age, just doing nothing.”
We turned the corner and started past the high school. A gang of tough kids was playing on the baseball diamond.
“Hey!” they yelled. “Stop!”
One solitary boy came running up to us. He was a short, fat kid; the rims of his nostrils were caked with old blood.
“Where are you going,” he said. He punched me on the arm. It hurt, but rubbing it would seem cowardly, so I didn’t.
“We’re just walking,” I said. “That any crime?”
“Who are you,” he said to Uncle Plazo. “The runt of the litter?”
“Maybe so,” said Uncle Plazo. “But you’re sure not a runt, not you.”
The fat boy blushed. His friends clung to the backstop of the baseball diamond.
“Where did you come from?” he asked. “Mars?”
Uncle Plazo cackled. “Everybody around here thinks I’m from Mars.” He shook his head. “Nope.”
“Leave him alone,” I said. “He’s just a harmless old guy.”
“Who are you, his keeper?” The boy scratched his stomach.
I did not particularly want to choose between the tough kids and Plazo. Still, I knew I had a duty toward Plazo, and so I said, “He’s my uncle. Push off.”
The boy started to say something, but changed his mind. “Ugly creeps,” he said, and he spit at me, but missed. Then he ran back to his friends.
“Yeah!” they yelled as we walked away. “You better go!”
We walked to the end of the block in silence. Uncle Plazo crossed his hands beneath his serape and held on to his skinny elbows. Finally, he said, “I’ve never been in a place like this all my life.”
The school year came to an end, my last year at the middle school. Uncle Plazo had been with us a month. In the fall I’d go on to the high school, where the rough kids hung out, but for now I was a big kid in my own right. I didn’t want to spend every afternoon walking with Plazo.
Ma decided Uncle Plazo was allowed to take a walk by himself, as long as he didn’t go off the block.
“Just keep going around, and soon enough you’ll be home,” said Ma. She had my father hang a birdhouse in the front yard as a landmark.
“Okay,” said Uncle Plazo. He carried a compass that somebody had given him, and sometimes when I got home I’d see him coming the other way, looking intently at his compass. Sometimes, he’d walk right past the house. Usually a neighborhood kid or two would be trailing him.
“It’s probably dinnertime,” I’d tell him, and he’d look up and smile. The kids would scatter. I wanted to call out to them. “Not my uncle!” I imagined shouting. But my parents trusted me to do the right thing, so Uncle Plazo and I went up the walk and into the house together.
“Stompy was a great guy,” said Uncle Plazo. He was sitting at the kitchen table, cross-legged on the chair. “He died too, I guess. Do you remember how, Corrine?”
“Who?” asked my mother. She was sitting on the tall stool that brought her legs up to counter level so she could work with her feet; she’d kicked off her slippers and was chopping celery.
“Stompy, Stompy, you know.”
“Before my time or after it,” she said. “Steve, will you wash
the green beans for me?”
“How about Madeline? The sword swallower? Remember, Corrine?”
“Her I remember,” said Ma. “She scared me. The tall woman?”
“No, not her, the Madeline before. The tall woman wasn’t Madeline, we just called her that after the first one.”
“Right,” said my mother. She shook her head.
“Those were great days,” said Uncle Plazo. He had a piece of cake my mother had given him; he mashed it with his fork.
“Oh,” said my mother. “I guess.”
“You didn’t like them? You didn’t think they were great days?”
“I was just a child, Plazo,” she said. She turned on her stool to face him. “I was twenty when I left.”
“A child?” he said. He stared at her, as if, having spent so many years being one of the Lost Aztec Children, he thought that child was a job, not a stage of life.
“I was only a teenager, Plazo,” my mother said. “I was easily scared.”
“No, no,” said Plazo. “No, not really?”
Ma smiled apologetically.
Plazo uncrossed his legs and set his heels on the chair’s edge. “I grew up there,” he said thoughtfully.
“I know you did,” she said.
I don’t know what he thought “there” was, whether he meant a certain time or the accumulation of all the places he had stayed. He tilted his head as if he were trying to see something.
“But scared,” said Uncle Plazo. “Sure, I can picture it. I can picture being scared.”
“Weren’t you ever?” my mother asked. “Isn’t this better?”
Uncle Plazo scratched his nose. I could see him decide not to answer.
I thought Uncle Plazo regretted being with us. Back in Boston, where he had lived with his brother, he’d probably found my mother’s address and thought: she’s good folk, she’s like me. He wanted to be with people he could talk about his life with, to stay on with the circus in any little way he could. In this, I thought, he’d be like any man forced into retirement. But here he was in the suburbs of Cleveland, with an absolutely ordinary family.
Because the fact is we were ordinary. If somebody asked what was different, I might say, well perhaps my mother needed me a little more than most mothers. It isn’t true, though: that I felt especially needed was part of her talent. Her only flamboyances were a fondness for capes and slippers and a dislike of stockings, all for practical reasons. The only thing she couldn’t do was—I want to say play piano, rock-climb, swim—but though I never saw her do these things, I’m not sure she couldn’t have. She couldn’t turn a cartwheel; she couldn’t jump rope by herself. But how many mothers can? She could hold the rope for my sisters, play jacks with them, could braid their hair; she could type and open jars and button my coat. My mother’s handicap, if that’s the dull word we are using, had nothing to do with me, or with anybody but herself. Everything in our life seemed usual, normal, average—even, I thought sometimes, boring.
That now included Uncle Plazo. He might have seemed interesting at first, but that wore off quick. The exoticness that people had paid to gawk at for so long was just a story that somebody had made up. My father was right: you could make anybody amazing just by insisting they were. Away from the pitchman, Uncle Plazo was powerless. The neighborhood kids were just listening to their own pitch, their own stories on where he came from and what he meant.
Uncle Plazo got restless as fall approached. He spoke of his brother more and more, things that his brother did. It was as if Zleeno were a fictional character loosely based on him; he shook his head and laughed admiringly, as if he had never done those things himself: talked back of the bally with the Skeleton Dude, who had taught the Lost Aztec Children some impeccable manners and some cusswords; looked up at a bannerline with his own picture on it; ridden across country on a train.
When it rained, Uncle Plazo walked through the house, up the stairs, down them. He’d appear for dinner with cobwebs in his hair or with a bug he’d found in the basement; one time, he found one of the snakes he so loved and presented it to Ma. The neighbors complained that he walked through their yards and yelled things at their dogs. Once, he walked in followed by our cat, who was growling. The cat and Plazo did not get along at the best of times, but we had never before seen the cat openly complain.
“Do you know what that cat did?” said Uncle Plazo. “She was going to kill a mouse.”
“That’s the reason we have her,” said Ma.
“To kill mice? You have a cat so it can kill mice? Look—” he said, and he opened his hand. A mouse balanced on his palm for just a minute, then sprang out of it, hit the floor, and ran into the corner, followed by the cat. Ma screamed; so did I.
“No!” yelled Plazo. “That cat’s going to do it again! She’s going to kill that mouse!” He ran after the cat, who now had the mouse in her mouth and growled through her mouthful. I quickly got to the back door to let it out.
“I don’t want this cat to kill that mouse,” said Uncle Plazo as the cat bellied out the door. He wrung his hands; he looked like he was going to cry.
Ma sat down at the kitchen table. “Come here, Plazo,” she said. He did, and she put a foot on his leg, behind his knee. “A cat has to kill a mouse; that’s its nature. You’ve seen that before.”
“Just because I see something doesn’t mean I like it. I’ve seen a million things, a million things, and I didn’t like some of them, not a bit.”
Ma took a deep breath. “But the cat helps us keep our house clean. Mice are dirty, and the cat cleans them up.”
“Clean’s not so great,” he said, stepping away from Ma’s leg. “Depends on how you get clean.”
My parents had hushed conversations about him. One night, I snuck out of bed to listen; I assumed they were making plans to send him off somewhere. But what I overheard that night was, YMCA and swimming lessons and church if he wanted.
“Roller skating,” Dad said suddenly, as if it were a solution he’d been looking for all his life.
Ma laughed. “Oh, maybe,” she said. “Maybe. But somehow I doubt it.”
My parents finally decided on something the whole family could help with. “He can read,” Ma told us. “Do you know what it means that he’s learned how?”
I shrugged. We were sorting through some of our old books, trying to find something that would turn Uncle Plazo into a reader.
“I could read when I was three,” said Carol, though this was an exaggeration.
“That’s because you had an older brother and sister to teach you,” said Ma. She was looking at The Little Engine That Could. Some smiling fruit beamed up at her from the page. “There’s no reason he ever needed to know how. Nobody ever taught him. He picked it up himself.”
“He just reads signs,” I said. “Just one or two words at a time.”
“That’s how everyone starts. One word at a time.” She flipped the book open with her toe. “He’s spent enough time on trains in his life. Maybe he’d like this.”
But Plazo didn’t want to read; he said he held no truck with books. He was sitting in the kitchen with the radio on, some housekeeping show.
“I don’t know what’s to become of me,” he told Ma, though he was smiling.
She didn’t say anything, just shook her head.
Plazo stood up and pulled his compass out of his pocket. “Going for a walk,” he said.
“Be back soon,” said Ma.
“Be back soon,” he answered.
When the door closed, Ma said, “Oh dear. Now what?”
“Well,” I said. “It could be worse. We could have to take care of the seal boy.”
Ma turned and stared at me. “What’s your point?”
“I dunno,” I said. I wasn’t used to my mother being angry; she almost never was. “Just—at least he’s only going through the neighbors’ yards on two feet, not on all fours and his stomach. We could have done worse than a dummy.”
Ma walked over to me del
iberately, hooked one leg around both of mine, and knocked me to the floor. My head hit the fridge.
“See how you like being that close to the ground,” she said.
I started to get up, but she put a foot on my chest and held me there.
“See how you like not being able to stand up.”
Her leg was strong, and I didn’t fight it. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re pretty sorry, yeah. You’re not such a prize yourself, you know. Listen: anybody who wants to stay with us can, if I say they can.” She shook her head sadly. “So, Steven,” she asked. “What do you say about me, when I’m not around?”
I shook my head in horror. “Nothing—”
“How do I know that?” She looked defeated, exhausted. “Until five seconds ago I didn’t know you were this hateful.” Her voice was quiet, and I could tell that she didn’t believe what she was saying. It was a punishment, one that worked.
Carol and Helen were huddled in the doorway. I put my hand on Ma’s ankle but couldn’t say anything.
“I’m just disgusted with you,” she said. She gave me a final shove with her foot, then turned around and left the room. Carol and Helen both burst into tears, as if Ma’s line were their cue.
I stayed on the floor in the kitchen for a while, away from my mother. I could feel the print of her foot on my chest, the hill of her ankle where it had rushed past my palm. Finally, I stood up and went to the hall and watched her in the living room. She kept peering through the window, looking for Plazo.
“Do you want me to go find him?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “We’ll give him a little more time.” She sat down in the easy chair. “Will you come here?”
I walked over to her. “I never say anything about you,” I said. “Nobody ever does. I’d kill anybody who did.”
Ma put one foot on my shoulder, then pulled me toward her in an embrace.
“But I have a pretty face,” she said.
I just looked at her. I was wearing shorts, and my shins were against the edge of the chair; the rough upholstery dug into my skin. I knew that one of my sisters would say something: “Of course you’re pretty, Ma.” They would touch her face and suggest playing with her makeup, trying on hats. I said nothing.
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