I still served Arty’s food, took care of his clothes, acted as masseuse and towel brigade for the shows. Arty could give orders to the Bag Man but he could talk to me.
One day in late spring Arty had tried interrogating me: “What are the twins up to? Why are they so stuck-up lately?”
Arty lay on the rubbing bench, eyes folded to slits watching my face as I pummeled lotion into his ribs and belly.
“I don’t know. Maybe they figure you’re busy.” I avoided his eyes, concentrating on the rope of muscle above his pelvis.
“I am busy. Are they taking advantage?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m busy, too. Roll over.”
He flopped onto his belly and I poured lotion down the deep ditch of spine between his banks of muscle.
“Their gates have been good this year.”
“Not like yours. You’re breaking three-ring records every week.”
“They’re getting the slops and doing good business. Have they changed their act?”
“Iphy says they’re dancing less, and they do play one of their own songs.”
“What are they up to?” His head is cranked up to glare at me.
“Don’t twist like that! You’ll tighten up on that side!” I could feel the Bag Man’s eyes on me from behind the mirror. I started work on Arty’s neck and he let the subject drop.
He could have made me tell if he’d pushed. Instead, he sicced the Bag Man on the twins.
“There are more weirdos around all the time,” Arty explained. “They need their own guard in addition to the general security. Beautiful girls like that. You don’t know what might happen.”
The following day the Bag Man had knocked at the door of the twins’ domain and handed Elly a small slip of paper torn from his notebook. Iphy leaned to read it:
Arturo the Aqua Man loves you and has sent me to protect you. I will be your guard.
Elly’s mouth set thinly. Iphy tried to smile at the Bag Man.
“That’s very kind, but …”
“Arty means to kill me entirely,” snapped Elly. “Go away. Tell Arty we don’t want you or anyone else guarding us.” Elly closed the door as Iphy called out, “But it’s a kind thought!”
After that the Bag Man followed them everywhere. Elly glared at me accusingly when we met. As Arty’s ally I was suspect. One thing about Elly, you were for her or against her. She didn’t recognize neutral zones. I sat on the hood of the generator truck polishing Grandpa and wondering what would happen when Arty found out about their paying visitors.
• • •
Elly was crying. Iphy looked barely conscious, like a beaten fighter absorbed in the consolations of shock. They were sprawled on the rosy bed, drenched in pink light. Their intricate separateness and unity seemed luxurious in the satin sheets. The nightie was short and sheer and their big, four-armed robe hung in clownish embarrassment, covering the tall mirror on the wall.
Elly grimaced and shook Iphy. “We’ll run away. There are other shows. We’ll just go!”
Iphy’s eyes opened calmly and I had an uncomfortable feeling that we had been wrong, that Iphy was the strong one. Her placid face quirked at the mouth.
“Don’t be stupid. You’re panicked. We don’t know how to drive. We’re too noticeable to sneak.”
“We could go to Mama’s sisters in Boston! We could hide in a freight car!” Elly’s desperation pumped her from fear to anger.
Iphy backed off gingerly. “Take a breath, Elly.”
The Bag Man had been following the twins for weeks. This had disrupted their once- or twice-a-month visits from connoisseurs of sexual novelty. But Jonathan Tomaini, who had felt himself defiled by pimping, urged them to take on one special client despite the risk. He had become addicted to his percentage of the profits.
“This is not just the state governor, believe me. The man’s fortune is legendary. When I realized who he was—I mean, he came to three shows on three consecutive days. The man is utterly fascinated. In LOVE. I knew his face but couldn’t place him. He understood immediately when I approached him. A gentleman. A man of refined sensibility. He did everything to spare me the humiliation of specific explanations. He made the offer himself, without urging. Ten thousand! Don’t tell me it’s not worth a little effort on our part!”
It was sheer cantankerous defiance in Elly that made her accept. She wasn’t interested in the money or the millionaire. She just hated having Arty cramp her style.
It took me days to figure out what happened that night. The twins had planned carefully. They went to bed early for a solid week to lull the Bag Man into complacence. On the fateful night they turned out the lights at the usual time and waited.
Tomaini was supposed to distract the Bag Man by taking him to the bachelor quarters for a beer and a long talk.
“Get him to tell his story,” Elly ordered. “He writes so slowly it will take hours. Get him drunk.”
The distinguished visitor arrived at the appointed time, was welcomed, and was settling into some serious exploration.
“He’d had his shower and we’d got him onto the bed and were just getting really friendly when the door broke open,” explained Iphy. “I was facing the mirror. I saw the whole thing in the mirror. That’s why I threw our robe over it.”
“How was I to know he couldn’t hold his liquor?” asked Tomaini. The truth was that Tomaini couldn’t hold his beer. Instead of getting the Bag Man to tell his story, Tomaini dwelt on his own favorite subject, himself. The Bag Man recounted the whole episode to Arty. I found a few of the crumpled sheets from his note pad in the trash.
One read: “He said he could do very special hand jobs because of his piano training. I thought he was going to offer to give me one of these special hand jobs so I got up to leave. He started to cry. He said even if he was ugly he wasn’t a freak. Something made me suspicious.”
Another sheet of the notepaper had been torn in two. I pieced it together and read: “The key worked. I heard sounds behind the bedroom door. A man’s voice. I went in. They were on the bed. He was kneeling. Elly was sucking his cock while Iphy licked and kissed his ass. His hands were twisted in their hair.”
I must have known, even then, what my time would be like. I saved these scraps from the Bag Man’s hand. I have them still, brown and fragile on the table beside me. Their value to me doesn’t come from the blighted hole who scratched the words, it is that they describe mysterious acts by my people. I wonder, for example, if the twins’ piano training had given them the Tomaini brand of dexterity with hand jobs? Could a non-musician learn it? Could I?
Children stumble through these most critical acts with no real help from the elders who are so anxious to teach them everything else. We were given rules and taboos for the toilet, the sneeze, the eating of an artichoke. Papa taught us all a particular brush stroke for cleaning our teeth, a special angle for the pen in our hand, the exact words for greeting elders, with fine-tuned distinctions for male, female, show folk, customers, or tradesmen. The twins and Arty were taught to design an act, whether it lasted three minutes or thirty, to tease, coax, and startle a crowd, to build to crescendo and then disappear in the instant of climax. From what I have come to understand of life, this show skill, this talk-’em, sock-’em, knock-’em-flat information, is as close as we got to that ultimate mystery. I throw death aside. Death is not mysterious. We all understand death far too well and spend chunks of life resisting, ignoring, or explaining away that knowledge.
But this real mystery I have never touched, never scratched. I’ve seen the tigers with their jaws wide, their fangs buried in each other’s throats, and their shadowed hides sizzling, tip to tip. I’ve seen the young norms tangled and gasping in the shadows between booths. I suspect that, even if I had begun as a norm, the saw-toothed yearning that whirls in me would bend me and spin me colorless, shrink me, scorch every hair from my body, and all invisibly so only my red eyes would blink out glimpses of the furnace thing inside. In fact, I smell the stench
of longing so clearly in the streets that I’m surprised there are not hundreds exactly like me on every corner.
The ten-thousand-dollar john was a prime norm with only a little sag as evidence of his age. His face was wind-dried and his chest had begun the droop that had not yet reached his belly.
He made a speech from the shower, a short, cheerful speech about himself. He’d been poor and he’d made money, he said, he’d changed laws in his time, and killed men and fathered children. He’d seen five million people lining up to punch his name onto a ballot, he’d seen regiments turn and halt and fire because he nodded. “And I figured I’d come to the end of being amazed. Run out of it, like you’d run out of sugar. But when I saw you lovely girls I thought to myself, maybe there’s more to life yet.”
“He said that,” explained Iphy in quiet pleasure, “as though he were really happy to be here with us. He’s the first we ever had who wasn’t ashamed and afraid of himself.”
When the Bag Man burst in, Iphy screamed at the mirror. Elly almost vomited on the ten-thou cock and the john leaped clear and snatched at his pants with his eyes alive. He had a gun in those pants, fortunately, and he held it on the wobbling, arm-waving, snorking Bag Man. The Bag Man was horrified. The john was fast with his trousers, and steady with his gun. He shook his head as he circled to the door. “You don’t need shakedowns or badger games, ladies. You could do very well on your own.”
Then he was gone and the Bag Man bent over the foot of the bed and raised his fists and pounded again and again in gurgling voicelessness on the pink and flopping sheets. Elly and Iphy cringed on the pillows at the other end. They heard the car start and the crackling gravel as it rolled away.
The car in the gravel woke me. It was too close to the vans. I peeked out as the Bag Man began his hammering on Arty’s door. The twins’ van gaped open with that bright spill into the blackness that always means disaster. I ran in and saw them. Elly was crying. Iphy looked numb. What scared them, what had unstrung Elly, was not knowing what Arty would do.
When Tomaini was doused awake with ice cubes down his shirt front, he talked. He stood, clinging to the back of the visitor’s chair in Arty’s big room. He gabbled at the floor, the ceiling, the walls, his eyes shifting mightily to avoid the stone-frog form of Arturo, and the menace of the Bag Man at the door.
“I’m a mess! A mess!” yelped Tomaini, his special hands twitching and jumping at his collar, at his buttons, at the stiff strands of his hair.
“How long? Why, months! For many months! Well, since they … well, I forget how long … I’m in such a state! They coerced me. They threatened to tell Mr. Binewski that I … forced myself on them! I was trapped! They were ruthless. Oh, they seem so sweet! Everyone thinks Iphigenia is … You all do! Miss River-of-Light Iphigenia!”
I watched from behind the mirror in the airless reek from the Bag Man’s medicated sheets and saw Arty’s face move at last, a small twitch to thaw his lips before trying to speak. He tipped his head at the Bag Man.
“Get his clothes. Some money.” Arty’s face closed back up as Tomaini babbled on and the Bag Man flipped open his notebook for a quick scribble. He passed the page to the console table and Arty glanced at it. No more expression on his face than on a grape. Arty nodded.
“The relentless pressure! Like living at the bottom of the sea,” Tomaini was saying as the Bag Man took his elbow and led him gently to the door. “It’s actually a relief that it’s over.”
When the twitter lost itself in the distance, Arty was still sitting motionless. I slid off the stool and hit the button that shut off the lamp on his bureau. By the time I got to him his tears were falling. He made no sound at all as I lifted him down from his throne and dragged him over to the bed. He lurched up and rolled onto his belly with his face away from me. I crawled up beside him and patted him but I felt miles away.
“Go.” His voice came, muffled by the coverlet. “If Chick and the folks are awake tell them everything’s O. K. and I’ll explain later.”
I went by the console on my way out. The Bag Man’s note read: “Let me break his hands. I’ll be careful.”
Mama and Papa were snoring. Chick was sitting up in his bed staring at me when I eased his door open. I put my fingers to my lips. He nodded and I leaned close to him. “Did you dream?”
He shook his head and touched my arm. “Want me to stop you hurting?”
“Nah!” I jerked away from him. “I mean,” I whispered, “I don’t hurt. I don’t feel anything.”
“That’s weird,” he muttered. He rolled over onto his pillow. His kid face, with a jelly stain on his ear, yawned. “Seems like there are a lot of people hurting. Seems like I should put them to sleep.” His hands scrabbled at the sheet. He slept.
“Is my face clean? No boogers?” Arty tipped his head back so I could look up his nose. “Okay. All right.” His eyes were swollen and as red as mine. “Arty, let me put some ice on your eyes.”
“I want to go now.” He was halfway across the room, humping fast to the door, waiting for me to open it. He brushed past my knee to the platform, turning to the twins’ entrance.
“Don’t knock. Go in.”
He led the way across the deserted living area, his reach-and-pull locomotion soundless on the carpet. He lunged upright and shouldered the bedroom door open.
Elly glared out of bruised eyes and sneered, “If it isn’t His Holy Armlessness! What an honor!” The twins were sitting up against their bed pillows with their hair wild. The breakfast tray I’d brought was untouched on the table. Iphy looked stern but Elly looked like a mad bat, teeth bared as she peered out from under her eyebrows. Iphy sounded tired and bored, “What do you want, Arty?”
He leaned there, propped against the door jamb, looking at them. I figured he’d have a set speech ready to flay them with. He’d stare for a while until they were off balance and then spray them with icy words. But when he finally opened his mouth it was the private, alone-in-the-dark Arty who spoke in a thin, scared voice. “How come?” he asked. “How come you did that?”
The twins, wide-eyed and wary, were startled too. They had expected “God” Arty. This feeble and betrayed mortal was a shock. Iphy frowned. Elly’s teeth parted but no sound came out.
“I mean,” Arty’s forehead folded in peaks of bewilderment, “you didn’t have to do that.” Seeing him like this I was scared. Had the blood exploded in his head? Had his temper triggered some spasm of the brain that changed him? Our fanged armadillo was suddenly peeled, shell-less.
Elly took a breath and got back on her high horse. “You don’t run us, Arty.”
“Oh, hey!” His voice high and ragged.
“We don’t worship your ass, Arty. Not at all.”
“Is that it? Iphy, tell me. Did she do it to keep you away from me?” He leaned forward, his flippers slipping on the door frame. A blue vein beat like an angry worm above his ear.
Iphy’s shoulders, held tight and high near her neck, relaxed.
“No,” she said. “I wanted to.”
Arty was back in his van by the time I caught up with him. He swung up into his throne and hit a button on the console with his flipper. He shooed me out. Said he wanted to talk to the Bag Man. I knew when he looked at me that this was our regular Arty, ready to kick ass by remote control.
“Arty!”
It was a duet shriek that made me drop Lily’s favorite cup onto the counter, cracking off the handle.
The twins were standing in their open doorway with mouths open and arms spread. “Arty!” they screamed.
The Bag Man’s face swam up from the room behind them. His hands closed on Elly’s shoulder and Iphy’s arm. Iphy looked straight at me with disgust smeared across her face, as the Bag Man pulled them inside.
I followed and saw the twins collapse onto the sofa and the Bag Man standing in front of them writing busily on his notepad. He must have already been there for a while. Slips of paper were strewn on the sofa and on the low table in front of i
t.
“Arty’s in the surgery watching Dr. Phyllis.” I bent to pick up some scraps of paper from the carpet. “I will be very good to you,” scrawled the Bag Man’s hand.
“Oly,” Iphy’s tired voice made me look up at her. “Oly, would you please go get Arty?” The Bag Man bent toward her, handing her his most recent note.
“What’s going on?”
“He gave us to the Bag Man,” tittered Elly. “We’re supposed to marry the Bag Man to keep us out of trouble.”
I looked at the wad of notes in my hand. I saw, “Arty loves you. He knows that I love you.”
“Creepy, hunh?” asked Elly. She grinned at me, and suddenly the twins were giggling hysterically, holding each other’s arms, rocking on the sofa. Their two long, lovely feet pointed straight out and tapped the floor in hilarity.
They didn’t care how the Bag Man felt, standing there with his bulging veil fluttering around his one blinking eye. They laughed at him, at the idea of him.
Looking at him, I was afraid. When he turned toward me I yelped. His big warm hand clenched softly on the back of my neck and he raised me until my toes barely touched the floor. A high whine pulled out of my throat as he carried me to the door, put me firmly outside, and shut it behind me.
I found Arty in the dark little five-seat theater above the surgery. His silhouette showed against the hot light pouring up out of the glass circle in the floor. I leaned beside him, feeling his coolness as I let my hand brush his bony flippers. He stared, with his chin propped on the rail, down into the surgery. Directly below, a long-haired woman with a white plastic tube mask over her mouth and nose stared up at us. What she saw was a mirror in the ceiling, intensifying the light from the lamps that surrounded it. The woman lay on a white table and was covered to the neck by a white sheet. Next to her head, the small figure of Chick sat, swathed in white, a mask over his nose and mouth, a cap pulled so far down over his hair that it bent his ears out. He wore surgical gloves and was slowly trickling his white plastic fingers through her long brown hair. At the other end of the table was Doc P. in white, hugely foreshortened, her arms heavy in white sleeves that moved in deliberate twitches as she worked. The woman on the table stared serenely at us without seeing. “She’s not asleep,” I muttered at Arty’s ear.
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