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soft dark eyes focused on Lorena’s belly asshe reached out and touched it with tiny, rosy fingers. Lorena felt the baby move.
    Suddenly the half lady sprang from her perch and landed on her hands on the sawdust-scattered floor. Lorena shrieked, grabbed at Pete, who staggered backward. “Jeezus!” he said. The half lady pranced around on her hands a bit, did a flip, and bounced back up on the stool, where she calmly patted her ringlets back into place.
    “Let’s go,” Lorena said to Pete, yanking on his sleeve.
    He ignored her. “Look! Baby Thelma!” he said. Baby Thelma weighed 655 pounds. “Six HUNNERD and FIF-ty-five POUNDS!” bellowed the barker, his undershirt translucent with sweat. Baby Thelma was piled into a chair that sagged dangerously beneath her. She wore a dainty nightie of a dress sprigged with flowers and lace, and flipped it flirtatiously above pale fleshy thighs. She had a sweet face, small, benign features embedded into a bow-topped global head that tipped and nodded just slightly at Pete’s astonished comment: “Jeezus!”
    “I want to go. Now.” Lorena tugged at Pete as she waddled toward the exit, but he yanked his arm away to stare at the lobster boy’s hands, the monkey woman’s beard, the alligator man’s skin, the porcine features of the pig-faced boy. He steered Lorena to the front of the crowd, where a child with a crusty scalp burrowed between them until he was the only thing between Lorena and Herman the Human Blockhead.
    The Human Blockhead was preparing his instruments on a little table just beyond the rope that separated him from the crowd. Precise as a surgeon, he laid out a screwdriver, a six-inch steel spike, and a silver mallet. As he did this, he told a joke, something about a dog in a bar, then picked up the screwdriver, tipped his head back, stuck the screwdriver all the way up one nostril and plucked it out again in a graceful swoop.
    Lorena felt her knees melt. “Pete,” she whimpered, but the Human Blockhead had more in store. “Just warming up,” he saidwith a grin. He looked like a marine with his close-cropped head, his square-set jaw, his blocky little body. He picked up the spike and stuck it in one nostril. Then with the silver mallet, he banged the spike up his nose.
    BONK. BONK. BONK.
    He drove that steel spike all the way up his nose until it disappeared into his head.
    Afterward, when they laid Lorena flat on a tarp outside the freak tent with a cold towel over her forehead, she said it was more the sound than the sight of that spike disappearing into the Human Blockhead’s nose that made her throw up.
    She went into labor before they got home. She had the baby the next day. The hospital was four blocks from the shipyard. All day long, she could hear its sound, metal on metal, the tattoo rhythm of the shipyard.
    Bonk. Bonk. Bonk.
    THEY NAMED THE baby Cassandra, after Pete’s grandmother, and called her Cassie. Lorena deflated rapidly, lost almost all the weight except for a soft roll just above her waist that never went away. Her belly button went back in, folded into a stretch-mark-scarred pocket, star-shaped. Pete poked it with his finger. “Now stay there,” he said, and it did.
    Cassie grew and life settled into a rhythm. She and Lorena fused into one, each dependent on the other, while Pete seemed to exist in a parallel world that touched theirs only when he needed to eat or sleep. After dinner he would listen to the war news as it spilled from the cathedral-shaped Philco radio, muttering to himself, Boy I’d show those Krauts a thing or two, damn this bum leg, I’d mow those Japs down, too, if it wasn’t for this bum leg. Then he would fall asleep, mouth open, snore rattling deep in his throat, head thrown back against the lace doily that protected the lumpy green chair.
    Lorena had crocheted doilies for each piece of furniture in theliving room, even the ottoman where Pete’s feet, splayed out into a V, rested, one toenail threatening to