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“Fifteen,” he said.
“Done.” Picking up the knife again, she lined up a handful of almonds and sliced them like a machine. Usually she couldn’t manage such precision.
“Still a shyster. I feel better already.”
“Checks will come through me,” she said, missing the angle on one almond and watching it ping off the wall. “And nobody knows about this. Nobody.”
“You’re not even going to tell Sam?”
“I’ll get around to telling Sam,” she said. “I just want to wait a little. Right now he’s developing his own act.”
“He better not be juggling. I don’t like competition.”
“He’s juggling, all right,” she said. “He’s juggling and walking a tightrope and balancing an egg on his nose.”
“I didn’t know he was so talented.”
“You just forgot,” Vivy said. “Stick around. The old acts are coming back to life.”
Four
Sam
Hot, hot, hot. Through May and into June, despite rumors of approaching rain that sprang up, spread, and dissolved like mirages, the temperatures in the valley around El Campo soared. Summer was always hot in this part of California; farmers planted long rows of apricot and pear trees, counting on sultry days to ripen the fruit. But these temperatures were too high, and blossoms were dropping before fruit could set. Nearly every afternoon passed one hundred degrees, and hardly any night dipped below eighty-five. Farmers were interviewed every night on the news. In grocery stores and beside swimming pools the heat was everybody’s only topic. Natural High was doing land-office business, half of its customers, some of them old enough for retirement, coming into the store wearing bathing suits and flip-flops. Sam rarely looked twice anymore. Looking at skin—even thin, depleted skin that had no business showing itself in public—only generated more heat.
At home he and Vivy slept clinging to opposite sides of the mattress, their arms and legs carefully sprawled to avoid any touch. “It’s not that I don’t love you, honey,” Vivy said one night when the air folded around their bodies like a heavy animal. She shifted her hip an inch further from Sam’s arm.
“Right. It’s not that I don’t love you, too.” He shifted and dangled his foot over the edge of the bed, letting Vivy hog the hot mattress. For a minute he entertained the notion that their arrangement on the bed was symbolic—Vivy spread-eagled, claiming three-quarters of the available space, Sam crowded to the very edge and hanging on. Then he let the thought go. Too hot to get mad, and way too hot for an argument. The thermostat was set at eighty, the lowest temperature they could afford, but somehow the house felt hotter than that.
Sleep loitered miles away. In a minute Sam would ask Vivy to turn off the bedside light, but for now he contented himself watching her study her scribbled-over list of acts. Occasionally, she inserted a question mark or an arrow. The list ran to three pages, a census of peculiar entertainments and rarefied skills. She’d told him about some band she’d picked up as a favor to Fredd, a band she said was going to make their fortune, but they weren’t coming to Natural High. Instead, she had dug up acts he’d forgotten they’d ever heard of, and she caroled around the house every time she unearthed another magician or clown or acrobat. In just two months she had contacted almost all on their old list, and took for granted that Sam would be as delighted about this undertaking as she was.
To be fair, at first he had gotten a bang out of the whole thing. He and Vivy went out for a celebratory drink the day she located Sir Smokes, a guy they’d first discovered in 1979 on a street corner in Sacramento wearing a leather vest and breeches, eating cigarettes as fast as people would light them for him. When Vivy finally tracked him down again, he was busking only a block away from his original corner. “Actually, he was hard to find,” she said now. “No phone.”
“Now that you’ve found him, what are you going to do with him? You can’t have a cigarette-eater play an ice cream store,” Sam said.
“I feel better knowing where he is. Who would have thought he’d still be alive?” Looking distracted, Vivy drew another arrow. “We personally saw him eat whole packs of Camels and live to tell the tale. He’d play huge at colleges. He’s the triumph of the individual over corporate America.”
“He’s a nut.”
“A nut with an esophagus made out of cast iron. I wonder what else he can eat.”
“No Marlboros—he said they didn’t have a good balance of flavors.”
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