Life Expectancy

separating fused digits would be easy. After that, I refused all instruction in clown craft until I was made whole."
        "But you had no talent for clowning."
        He nodded. "After the surgery, I tried hard to keep my end of the bargain, but I was a lousy clown. From the moment my toes and fingers were separated, I knew."
        "You were born an aerialist," Lorrie said.
        "Yes. Secretly I took some instruction. Too late by then. One has to begin practicing even younger. Besides, in the eyes of that talking sewer sludge, Virgilio, I was tainted with clown blood. He'd pull all the strings in his web to prevent me from performing."
        "So eventually you decided to throw your life away in a frenzy of vengeance," I said, pretty much quoting him from the night we had met him in 1994.
        He repeated what he had told us almost a decade ago: "Might as well die if I can't fly."
        "The crazy story he told you about the night of your birth, the assassin nurse and the doctor bribed by Virgilio to kill your mother-that was all a grotesque lie," I told him.
        Punchinello smiled through his tears and shook his head. "I sorta suspected it might be."
        This admission chilled me. "You sorta suspected it might be? But you still came back to Snow Village to kill a bunch of people and blow things up?"
        He shrugged. "It was something to do. The hatred was something to hold on to. I didn't have anything else."
        Something to do. It's a slow Friday night, so let's blow up a town.
        Instead of giving voice to that thought, I said, "You seem to have a facility for foreign languages. You could've become a teacher, a translator."
        "All my life, I'd never been able to please the great Beezo. And there was no one else who wanted me to please them. Being a teacher wouldn't have impressed him. But taking extreme vengeance for my mother's death-I know that made him proud of me." An almost beatific smile overcame him. "I know my father loved me for that."
        "Really?" I asked with scorn I could not entirely conceal. "You know he did? He never even sent you a Christmas card."
        A little knife of sadness whittled at his smile. "I'll grant you he was never a good father. But I know he loved me for what I did."
        Lorrie said, "I'm sure he did, Punch. I think you did what you had to do." With those words, she reminded me that we had come here to win him over, not to alienate him.
        Her approval, insincere to my ear but genuine to his, restored Punchinello's faltering smile. "If things hadn't gone all wrong that night in Snow Village, you and I might have had a future together, instead of you and him."
        "Boy, that's something to think about, isn't it?" she replied, and matched his smile.
        "Syndactyly," I said again.
        He blinked, and his witless smile morphed into puzzlement. "You never said how you knew about that."
        "I wasn't born with hand problems, but I had three fused toes on my right foot, two on my left."
        More appalled than astonished, he said, "What in God's name kind of rotten hospital was that?"
        I marveled that he could seem sometimes so sane and sometimes so flat-out crazy, that he could be smart enough to earn a law degree and learn German but could say something as stupid as what he'd just said.
        "It had nothing to do with the hospital."
        "I should have blown it up, too."
        With a glance, I consulted Lorrie.
        She took a deep breath and nodded.
        To Punchinello, I said, "We both had fused digits because we're brothers. We're twins."
        He favored me with a look of amazement, then gave some of it to Lorrie.
        Next came a slow crooked grin, a squint of amused suspicion. "Try that one with some dope who's never seen himself in a mirror."
        "We don't look alike," I said, "because we're fraternal twins, not identical twins."
        I didn't want to be his fraternal twin, not only because that made me the brother to a homicidal maniac, but also because I didn't want to put Konrad Beezo's picture in the family album and label it father.
        Natalie Vivacemente Beezo might have been beautiful beyond imagining, perfection of the flesh, but even she was not welcome in my family tree.
        I have one father and one mother, Rudy and Maddy Tock. They-and only they-raised me to be the person I am, gave me the chance to become who I