She was fifteen that year and had run away and hooked up with an occult guitarist moonlighting as a United Parcel delivery driver who hid her in his “bohemian”—as the report called it—apartment for three weeks until she got bored and strolled back to the school. She was indifferent to repentance, according to the nun, and far from a virgin, according to the doctor. Heavenly Mary had prevented her from getting pregnant or diseased. They threatened to throw her out or to turn her over to the juvenile authorities. In the end my monthly payments increased by 50 percent and she stayed.
Fingering the blistering letter, I remember precisely the hoops my heart went through over the incident. I was terrified for her, but strangely delighted, as though her wildness were a triumph of her genes over indoctrination. I lay the thin sheaf of drawings she gave me on top of the rest, and then lift the tray out and set it aside.
The body of the trunk is crammed with clipping books, thick stacks of paper wrapped in black plastic. Photographs. Sound tapes. A tight roll of posters held by dry and brittle rubber bands.
This fragile, flammable heap is all that’s left of my life. It is the history of Miranda’s source. She soars and stomps and burns through her days with no notion of the causes that formed her. She imagines herself isolated and unique. She is unaware that she is part of, and the product of, forces assembled before she was born.
She can be flip about her tail. Or she can try. She is ignorant of its meaning and oblivious to its value. But something in her blood aches, warning her.
I slip the topmost poster from the roll. The paper is stiff, wanting to break rather than tear. Carefully spreading it, uncoiling it, sliding plastic-wrapped bundles onto the corners to hold it down, I open it on the musty carpet.
The Binewskis are revealed, dressed in glittering white, enchanted against sea greens and blues, smiling, together still on wide paper. The poster has a fountain format with the whole family spewing upward from Chick, during his brief “Fortunato—The Strongest Child in the World” period. Papa killed this poster, along with Chick’s act, before the public saw either of them. But it is my favorite family portrait. Chick, six years old and golden, is smiling at the bottom, his arms straight up with his parents standing on his hands. The beauteous “Crystal Lily” in an openly amorous pose, one leg kicking high out of her dance skirt, wrapped in the arms of the handsome “Ring Master Al,” our Papa, Aloysius, in high boots and chalk jodhpurs—their smiles leaping upward in yellow light toward our stars, our treasures—“Arturo the Amazing Aqua Boy,” afloat with his flippers spread angelically in hinted liquid in the upper right corner, his bare skull gleaming and haloed. In the left corner, at a cunningly suggested keyboard swirling out of the blue, “The Magnificent Musical Siamese Twins, Electra and Iphigenia!” Elly and Iphy with their long hair smoothed into black buns, slim white arms entwined, pale faces beaming out in shafts from their violet eyes.
And I am there also. “Albino Olympia,” viewed from the side to display my hump, bald nobbly head tilted charmingly, curtsying with one arm pointing at the glorious Chick and his miraculous burden. Chick was six and I was twelve but he loomed a full head taller. The arched banner across the top in joyous glitter, “The Fabulous Binewskis.”
The wallet-sized school picture from Miranda’s senior year shows her face the same size as the Binewski poster faces. I slide the photo around, next to Chick, to Arty, to Papa Al. It is Arty she looks like. Those Binewski cheekbones and the Mongol eyes. Would she see it?
BOOK II
Your Dragon—Care, Feeding, and Identifying Fewmets
4
Papa’s Roses
The Olympia McGurk profile in the personnel computer of Radio KBNK lists my training as “Elocution and diction, and microphonic presentation as taught by Aloysius Binewski,” which I wrote calmly and confidently into my résumé as though every well-trained voice would recognize the name of the master.
That was Papa, sitting in the back of the tent at the soundboard, wearing headphones and glaring at me as I stood on one foot on the stage with the old ragged microphone waving aimlessly near my mouth. Papa, hollering, “Boring!” at my fiftieth delivery of “Step right this way, folks!” or mimicking cruelly, “Ya-ta, ya-ta, ya-ta!” if I fell into a repetitive rhythm on “From the darkest mysteries of science, a revelation of poetic grace.”
“Move your lips, for shit’s sake!” howled Papa, or “Stop with the mouse farts and project!
“That’s a double-reed instrument! It is called a voice! It is not a comb wrapped in waxed paper! I gave it to you from the love in my guts for your scrawny and unmarketable carcass, so be kind enough to use it properly!”
And me all the while having to pee—coughing into the mike when my throat was tired and raw—eyes stinging and lips and chin crumpling in grief at his anger. The sweet tinkle of Electra on the bass and Iphy on the treble with Mama’s voice counting, “One and two and …” as the twins had their piano lesson inside the trailer. The gurgle and hum of the pumps that filtered my brother Arty’s “Aqua Boy” tank. And the dim round moon of baby Fortunato’s face peering at me from the dark of the risers above Papa.
If I finally did it right and got all the way through from “Step up, friends” to “A vision of the miraculous extravagance of Nature for the same simple price as an overcooked hotdog” without a single bellow of rage from my beloved papa, then he would swoop me up in huge arms and tuck me onto a shoulder, where I could grab his astounding hair in my fists and ride high through the tent flaps into the light, with Fortunato’s golden head chugging along far below, and we would parade the long street of booths with me laughing down at the red-haired girls who sold the candy and at the toothless wheelman and Horst the Cat Man all nodding at Papa’s instructions, and hearing, feeling his huge voice rumble out from beneath my legs, “This little beetle did her lessons just right today.”
It’s funny, in a dingy way, that I make my little living by reading. I have to smile because I used to avoid reading. It scared me.
It never bothered Arty. He read constantly—anything—but his favorites were ghost stories and horror tales.
When we were still children I was the one who turned his pages. He’d lie in bed reading late when everyone else was asleep. I lay beside him and held his lamp and turned the pages and watched his eyes move in quick jerks down the print. Reading was never a quiet pastime for Arty. He rocked, grunted, muttered, and exclaimed. He was in one of his toilet phases at that time. “Sweet rosy-brown arsehole” was his expression of pleasure. “Shitsucker” was the pejorative.
“Don’t you get dreams?” I asked him. “Don’t you get scared reading those at night? They’re supposed to scare you.”
“Hey, nit squat! These are written by norms to scare norms. And do you know what the monsters and demons and rancid spirits are? Us, that’s what. You and me. We are the things that come to the norms in nightmares. The thing that lurks in the bell tower and bites out the throats of the choirboys—that’s you, Oly. And the thing in the closet that makes the babies scream in the dark before it sucks their last breath—that’s me. And the rustling in the brush and the strange piping cries that chill the spine on a deserted road at twilight—that’s the twins singing practice scales while they look for berries.
“Don’t shake your head at me! These books teach me a lot. They don’t scare me because they’re about me. Turn the page.”
• • •
Maybe it’s mean to think, but the best time was before Chick was born. Things were simple. Papa would tell us about the hard times and explain that Arty had brought success to the show, and that Elly and Iphy had helped the business and, because he was a kind man, that even Oly had “done her part.” There was always work but it was good.
Mornings were our time. After lessons and before the stage shows began at 2 P.M. we were free creatures. Papa connected two chunks of tire tread with a nylon web, and attached web straps to fit over Arty’s fore and aft fins. With this rubber-tread armor
on his chest and belly, Arty could slither almost anywhere.
Papa thought we should be mysteries that the townies couldn’t see without paying. But, if we were in the country, we were allowed to ramble as long as we stuck together.
“Get your asses the hell out of that tree!”
The farmer snapped his belt, doubled against itself, the strap wide enough to sting the air all the way up beside us among the Bings. Arty pressed his head back against the trunk and peered down at the man with the belt. He was old and strong and his eyes clicked on me as soon as I moved. I dodged out of sight and the belt snapped again. The leaves quivered above where Elly and Iphy were perched. They’d been bickering about how many cherries they could eat without sharing a bellyache and the runs. It must have been their high voices that drew this old codger. They were silent now, scared as usual.
“Come down now, or by all that crackles I’ll be up there after you!” He didn’t really sound mad. He’d stopped a ways out from the tree, too smart to come underneath where things might drop on him.
Arty’s mouth moved close to my ear. “You first, then Elly and Iphy. He thinks it’s kids.”
I crammed my voice into the top of my mouth and pitched it silly, “We’re coming, mister, don’t hurt us!” I took my dark glasses off and poked my head past the edge so he could see my ears sticking out from under my watch cap. I squinted so he couldn’t tell the color of my eyes. The farmer’s shrewd eyes tightened on me. His mouth quirked into one corner for a spit.
“I’ll hurt you in a minute.”
“We’ve got to help our brother, mister, just a second.”
Arty stretched his neck and clamped his jaw onto the last twig of cherries I held as I began climbing out of the tree crotch. “Elly,” I called deliberately, “Iphy, help me get Arty down.” A long leg appeared with a crumpled pink sock and a white sneaker. I peeked at the farmer. He cracked the folded belt against his high rubber boot. He was watching but he’d loosened a bit. The girls’ names did that, soft, old-fashioned things. And the “Don’t hurt us” had him disarmed.
“Psst!” Iphy was looking anxiously down at me while Elly maneuvered the descent. Arty muttered softly up at them, “Oly goes down first. You hand me down to her and then come.”
“We’re coming down, mister,” I called, and then slid away from Arty, down the trunk, gripping with toes and fingers in the deep cracks of the bark to slip down the easy slope of the tree on the side away from the brown-faced man with the belt. When I hit the ground I stepped back, bent forward, and rubbed my cap off against the trunk. I was reaching up for Arty when I heard the old bastard grunt. He’d seen my hump and my bald head. The twins were lowering Arty with three hands and hugging the tree with the fourth. Arty’s clothes hissed and snagged on the bark as he slid. I caught his hips on my chest and he slid down my belly to the ground. The twins bounced down the trunk, peering from both sides at the farmer. I turned to look at him. His eyes slit into suspicious surprise. Arty started humping toward him quickly. I jumped after. The twins caught up and Elly held my hand as we moved toward the farmer. He fell down on his butt in the grass. His belt rolled out flat beside him. We went past him fast and out of his cherry orchard.
Later in bed I decided Arty was smart. It was the order of our appearance that got the guy. Here he was cracking his belt and chuckling inside about another summer’s batch of kids in the cherry trees. He’d be rehearsing the story already, to tell his wife over chicken and biscuits in the kitchen, as he sat with his sleeves still damp from scrubbing and his hat off showing the pale stretch below his hair where the sunburn ended.
“Caught Jethro’s grandkids in the Bings today,” he’d say, “all up one tree, same as their daddy and his sis twenty years ago.” And he and his wife smiling at each other and her pouring the iced coffee and saying she hoped he hadn’t scared them too much. But while all this was readying behind his eyes we stepped out and dropped him. First me, twisted under my hump, the watch cap popping its bald shock, and then the 1.88 seconds for him to register the shape of Arturo and the way he moved, and, most important, which direction he was heading. If that had been all he might have taken a pitchfork to us. But then came the night-haired girls, milk-skinned, flower-eyed, and their two long legs in the slumping pink socks. The old man had thirty years of shooing kids from trees yanked out of him. I wondered if he would say anything at all about it to anybody.
Arty’s head jerked around and his eyes ripped at me. The shadows of sharp bone and muscle strained at his tight skin. Anger.
“Pick me up. Now. Pick me up.” He was heavy but I hoisted him from the middle until he leaned against me, upright, then crouched and hefted him onto my shoulder. His head and chest faced the rear, his round butt curving into my arms.
“I hate long grass. Hate it.” His voice came into my left ear as we moved slowly through the field. “You try humping along with your nose in the snakes and cow shit for a block or two.”
Arty always talked to the people. It was a central charm of his act that, though he looked and acted alien, part animal, part myth, he would prop his chin on the lip of the tank to talk “just like folks.” Only it wasn’t quite like folks.
At first, when Arty was tiny, Al was his enthusiastic master of ceremonies. Arty gradually worked his way in and took over the talking entirely. Before too long Al just stood out front and lured the crowd in.
Arty started with explanatory chat about his own physique but soon discovered the power of piffle and vapor. Greeting-card sentiments, intoned pretentiously in the stage-lit waver of the tank by such an intriguing little deviant, packed a surprising wallop.
Arty and Papa experimented. Arty’s show changed in small ways—a pink spotlight instead of red—or, occasionally, in big ways. It was always a sit-down show, a bench-and-bleacher act. The tank and Arty were the only focus. For a while Arty made a dry entrance. He came out on the platform above the tank before diving in. Then he decided that folks wanted to think that he lived in the water all the time—maybe even breathed water. After that he always made his first appearance in the water. He used a screen in the water for a while, hiding behind it and swimming out into the brightly visible part of the tank when Papa signaled. Arty got sick of waiting and had a big tube tunnel run up through the tank floor so he could wait dry in the back and make a dramatic swoosh entrance when the lights came up. Arty spewing upward in a burst of luminescent bubbles with a thrumming fanfare of recorded music. It got the crowd going.
Eventually Arty grew bored with the Gilled Illusion of Aqua Boy, and in his Arturan phase enjoyed parading before his throng (at a distance, in a golf cart) on dry land, but he stuck to the submariner identity for a long time.
As he bitterly pointed out, he wasn’t extravagant enough looking to hold a crowd for twenty minutes (the length of the show in those early days) by just lolling around and letting them gawk. He had to do something. The seal tricks of his infancy soon palled on him. Swimming was useful. The bright tank in the dim tent was a focus. The water and his floating form were soothing, hypnotic. People stared at the tank and his undulating figure as they would at a bright fire. The tank made him exotic but safe. “They can relax,” Arty theorized, “because they know I’m not going to jump up into their laps.” (Arty tended to be snide about laps, not having one of his own.)
“It’s a fiendish waste to get ’em into a beautiful sucker zone of mind and then not do anything with them,” Arty would lament. So he learned to talk. He recited rhymes, quoted the more saccharine philosophers, commented on human nature. The standard approach, and the line Papa always wanted Arty to take, was jokes, comedy, a creaking stand-up patter that would seem unique coming from the Aqua Boy. But Arty wouldn’t go for it. “I don’t want those scumbags laughing at me,” he’d snarl. “I want them amazed at me, maybe scared of me, but I won’t let them laugh. No. Oh, a little chuckle because I’m witty, sure. But not a running line.”
Arty’s few jokes, the brief crackling relief from a
mystic format, were always dry and biting and directed outward, away from himself.
The misty cauldron of the act was a constant. “They want to be amazed and scared. That’s why they’re here,” Arty said.
Gradually, inevitably, he discovered the Oracle. “The guy who asks the question and thinks he hears an answer is the guy who makes an Oracle.” He’d been reading books on Oriental philosophy and was spouting it solemnly over the lip of the tank one day when a pale woman on the bleachers stood up and asked him whether her fifteen-year-old son, who had run away months before, was alive or dead.
Without thinking at all, without missing a beat, he whipped out, “Weeping at night alone and yearning for you, working like a man in daylight, silently.” She burst out bawling and hollering, “Bless you, thank you, bless you, thank you,” as she crawled out over a row of knees and left snorking into her hanky.
She must have told her friends because the next two shows were pimpled with shouted questions from the bleachers and Arty’s vague, impromptu answers.
He had the redhead who sold the tickets hand out three-by-five cards for people to write questions on. The act took on a distinct odor of palm reading and advice to the love-or-otherwise-lorn. Papa had thousands of “Ask Aqua Boy” posters printed and slathered up everywhere we went.
I never knew the twins very well. Maybe Arty was right in claiming I was jealous of them. They were too charming. The whole crew loved them. The norm crowds loved them. In towns we passed through regularly pairs of young girls would come to the show dressed in a single long skirt in imitation of the twins. Arty wasn’t delighted with their popularity either, of course. But he had a way of splitting them. To me they were inaccessible. They didn’t need me to do anything for them. Iphy was always kind to me. She was kind to everybody. But Elly was careful to keep me in my place. They were self-sufficient. They needed only each other. And Elly, rest her hard and toothy soul, ruled their body.
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