The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “On a brand-new rig? Okay, kid, it’s your neck,” the catcher called.

  The moment Mario left the platform, Tommy knew what the younger flyer was trying to do: the difficult, the legendary, the near-impossible triple midair somersault. He made the second turn and flipped over for the third, but he had started a fraction too late; he turned in midair, rolled over, plunged down into the net, bounced twice, and laughed in chagrin. He vaulted over the edge of the net. From a distance of forty feet Tommy had thought him grown-up; now he saw that Mario was only a few years older than he was himself.

  “What you staring at, kid?”

  “No law against watching, is there?” Tommy retorted. “I thought you were good, that’s all. The last flyers we had weren’t worth watching.”

  “Yeah. I looked great just now, didn’t I?”

  Tommy said, suddenly shy, “That was tough luck. Looked like you almost had it. You’ll do it sometime, though.”

  “Oh, sure. Someday. I’ve done it twice in a thousand tries. Maybe in the second thousand I’ll do it four or five. Who are you, anyhow? You’re no town kid. You belong here?”

  “I’m Tommy Zane, Junior.”

  “Tom Zane’s kid? I met your dad last night.” The flyer put out his hand and shook Tommy’s. “You going to be a cat man too someday?”

  “No, Mister Santelli.”

  The older boy laughed. “Hey, you make me feel old. Mister Santelli is my grandfather, up there.”

  “I heard him call you Mario.”

  “That’s the way they bill me on the road. There’s always been a Mario in the family. That’s Papa Tony, my grandfather. And the catcher is Angelo, my uncle—my mother’s brother. He’s a Santelli, too. But my name is Matt Gardner—Matthew, Junior, really. He was my mother’s catcher when she was in the act, but he died when I was a little kid. My sister, Elissa, left the show a year ago and got married. Are you in the show?”

  “I ride on the parade floats, and I help Ma Leighty with costumes for the spec,” Tommy said, “and sometimes I fill in with the aerial ballet if one of the girls wants a day off. In a wig, that is.” Then he found the nerve to say what he wanted to say: “But what I really want is to be a flyer.”

  He had expected Mario to laugh, or to say something patronizing, like most grown-ups. It had suddenly seemed so important to get it said that he felt he could even take that—from a real flyer. But Mario only quirked up one of the devilish eyebrows. “Is that so? How long you been in the aerial ballet?”

  “I started learning web work when I was about nine. All the kids do it.”

  “I know. My sister did. Are you any good?”

  “Nothing to be good at, in a web act,” Tommy said, exasperated. “Ma Leighty could do it, if the ropes would hold her up!”

  Mario started to laugh and then didn’t. He gave Tommy a sharp look, drawing down his eyebrows so that they were almost level. Then he looked up at the empty rigging; Papa Tony and Angelo had come down.

  “Tell you what. Come on up, if you want to.”

  “Up there? On the rigging?”

  “Scared?”

  “No,” Tommy said quickly, “only the one time I went up they chased me off. And I got a licking.”

  “Well, I’ll guarantee nobody will lick you for it,” Mario said. “Come on up, then.”

  For the first time, then, he climbed the narrow, jiggling rope ladder to the high platform. Even this first time he climbed it as he had seen other flyers do; not like an ordinary ladder, grasping the side ropes and placing the feet on the rungs, but holding only one of the side ropes, keeping his body on the outside and using the rungs only as toeholds for leverage upward. He had never done it before, but it seemed as natural as breathing. The platform joggled and swayed as Mario stepped off beside him.

  “Heights don’t bother you, I see. How tall is your father?”

  “About five feet seven, I guess. Maybe not quite.”

  “And your mother?”

  “About my size. Why?”

  “Because if you’re going to grow up to be six feet tall, forget it. I’m supposed to be too tall for a flyer, and I’m only about five feet eight. Chances are you won’t be that tall, though. How old are you? About ten?”

  “I was fourteen in May,” Tommy said coldly.

  “Small for your age, then. No, I’m not insulting you, because that’s good; it means you’re old enough to start. The only thing is, you have to be tall enough to reach the bar from the platform. Here.” He reached up and pulled down the trapeze from the hook where it was anchored. “Can you reach it?”

  He could, and it was with a sort of held-breath wonder that he first closed his fingers around the rough, taped surface of the bar. Mario said, “You know how to fall in the net, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Tommy said, his voice only a thread. “You have to land on your back, is all.”

  “Well, how about it? Want to try a swing?”

  Tommy had not been sure the flyer was serious. “Honest? Can I?”

  “You’ll never learn any younger. Go ahead.”

  It suddenly seemed a very long way down, and the net looked much too small and flimsy way down there.

  “Go ahead,” Mario said. “The worst you can do is fall in the net. Now.”

  Tommy got a firm grip on the bar and jumped off the platform. Remembering what he had seen them do when they started a swing, he kicked out with both feet, arching his body. He managed to get the trapeze into a long forward swing, but at the end of the arc the ropes buckled and his hands began to slip—later he learned how performers coated them with resin—and he twisted frantically, kicked out hard, and managed to get up enough momentum to swing back. He missed the platform, and the returning trapeze swung him out again.

  “Don’t panic,” Mario shouted. “Can you change hands and face around this way? If you can’t, wait till the swing dies and drop into the net.”

  He had done this kind of midair turn a dozen times on a single trapeze ten feet high. The forward swing carried him to the end of the arc, and he somehow managed to shift his slippery hands around so he faced the platform. As the momentum of the bar carried him back, he jumped for the platform and scrambled off beside Mario, knocking the trapeze wildly sidewise and grabbing with clumsy haste at the side ropes.

  “Easy! Easy!” Mario caught and steadied him. “You’ll wind up in the net yet! But anyway, you got back. I thought you’d have to drop off—most everybody does, the first time. I know I did. Lost my grip, too, and hung by one arm—nearly pulled my arm out at the shoulder.” He grinned at the memory. “Tell you what. You come around—oh, four, five times a week after we get the rigs set is the morning—and I’ll get you started. But don’t get in a hurry.”

  That had been several months ago, and it hadn’t been quite as simple as that. His mother had gone dead white when Tommy burst into the Zane trailer and exploded with the news. He’d met the new flyers, and one of them said he would teach him to fly, had even let him up on the rigging.

  “I’ll have something to say to that young man,” she snapped, hustling the lunch dishes into the kitchen sink. Tom Zane, lighting his after-dinner pipe, had taken it more calmly.

  “Calm down, Beth. You’ve known since he was a kid that he was nuts about flying, and he’s learned as much as Margot can teach him. I was going to ask Tonio Santelli to take him on—”

  “Now look, Tom. I let him learn tumbling, work swinging ladders, aerial ballet, but the flying rig? Tom, that’s sixty feet in the air! One slip—”

  “Mother . . .” Tommy said, feeling the knot closing tight inside him again. “They use a forty-foot rigging. The people up at the top of the bleachers are almost that high. And there’s a net.”

  “Look, Beth, I know the Santellis. Tonio was flying before you and I were born. None of them would let Tommy within a mile of the rig unless they were willing to look after him. I’m surprised they want to bother with the kid—they usually work with the family, and don’t
let any outsiders in. Who was it, Tommy? The old man—Antonio?”

  “No, the kid. The one they call Mario.”

  “Look,” Beth Zane said, “maybe the old man is okay, but a kid? Is he old enough to know what he’s doing?”

  “He’s not all that much of a kid,” Tom said. “Draft age, I think—twenty, twenty-one. I know he’s been flying with them for years. And he’s very good. The act used to be with Starr’s.”

  “Then what in the world are they doing with a two-bit outfit the size of Lambeth?”

  “There was an accident in the thirties, and the family split up for a while,” Tom Zane said. “I don’t know all the details.” His face held a look Tommy had known from childhood, a look that said his father knew perfectly well but was not going to discuss it in front of Tommy. “Anyhow, they’re here, and it’s Tommy’s good luck; he couldn’t possibly learn from anyone better. And they’re decent people, Beth, family people. Old-country circus people. Tommy will be perfectly all right with them. Relax, Beth. Let the kid enjoy himself.”

  And so it began, haphazardly at first, a few minutes at a time. Only Mario paid the slightest attention to Tommy. Papa Tony didn’t seem to know Tommy was alive—or so Tommy thought then—and Tommy was just as well pleased. Antonio Santelli had a powerful yell and a quick-flaring temper which he turned indiscriminately on his family and outsiders. Angelo was polite and friendly enough, but to him Tommy was just another of the kids with the show. Outside the few minutes of his lessons, it meant hours of hard, painstaking calisthenics; working on the parallel bars his father put up for him; hours of repeating simple back-and-forward swings over and over, of learning to manage his body at any angle, to turn around and change hands at any point in his swing, to fall into the safety net without hurting himself. Eventually the haphazard few minutes three or four times a week turned into a daily routine. As soon as the Santellis’ regular morning workout was over, when Papa Tony and Angelo had pulled on their sweaters and gone, Mario would signal to Tommy and he would climb up and work on the routine of tricks Mario allowed him to do.

  He had begun, quite soon, to get impatient to do some real flying. Swinging back and forth on a single trapeze, varied with drops into the net and maneuvering his body over and around the bar, wasn’t really much different from fooling around on an aerial ladder ten feet off the ground. But when he let Mario see his impatience, he had been cut off with a curt, “Not till I think you’re good and ready. I told you not to get in a hurry.”

  But it had only been a week or so later—somewhere in Arkansas; Tommy never remembered the name of the town—that when he joined them in the morning, Angelo was still on the rigging. Tommy hesitated, but Mario signaled him to come up anyway. Then he said, “Tom, watch this carefully.” He swung out on the bar, flipped up till he was sitting in it like a swing, then slipped backward, holding on by his hands and bracing himself with his ankles—all these things he had taught Tommy to do. Then, as Angelo reached the high point of his swing, Mario let go of the bar and fell toward him, catching his wrists with effortless ease. They swung together, wrists locked, for a moment. When Mario returned to the platform, he said, “Think you can do that today?”

  A yeasting excitement boiled up inside Tommy. “Can I really?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out, I guess. Sooner or later you’ll freeze on that bar, unless we get you off it.”

  Angelo dived down into the net. Tommy made a small sound, protest and disappointment, and Mario said, “It’s okay, I’m going to catch for you. You think I’d waste Angelo’s time on you?”

  “You’re a catcher, too?”

  “Sometimes. Papa Tony’s a great one for insisting that everybody has to learn to do everything. I started out as the catcher and my kid brother Johnny was the flyer, because I was taller than he was; only he liked to catch and I wanted to fly, so we swapped.”

  “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  “I’ve got two of them. Twins.”

  “What are their names?”

  “John and Mark. And I’ve got a sister, Liss.”

  “How come they’re not with the act?”

  “Mark never did learn to fly. Johnny quit the act and went off with an act of his own, two, three years ago. And Liss got married. You want to fly or stand around gabbing?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to waste time.”

  “Forget it. It’s okay.” Mario went down into the net, climbed the rope at the far end, and by the time he had pulled himself into the catcher’s trapeze, he was smiling again.

  “Okay, go ahead. Now remember, when I call, you just let go and dive at me. Don’t grab, just put your hands out and I’ll be there. You’ll probably miss, you know—everybody does the first time.” He let go with his hands, leaned back, twisting his legs around the padded lower supports of the catch trap, and began the long, steady, back-and-forth swing.

  Tommy stood poised on the pedestal, his mouth dry, but feeling something inside him counting off that steady pendulum swing. He took the bar between his hands.

  “Now!” Mario said, but Tommy was already off the pedestal, swinging out firmly, feeling his body flex upward. In the full stretch of the swing, he got himself up, arms and knees—They used to call it “skinning the cat,” he thought in a split second—heard Mario say, “Now!” again, let go, and felt the momentum of the swing carry him toward Mario’s outstretched hands.

  He missed, of course, and felt the sickening drop as his flight turned into a plunge. “Roll over!” Mario shouted, but Tommy had already twisted over and balled up, instinct operating, a reflex that was no longer conscious at all. He struck the net where it began to curve up against the guy lines and slid instead of bouncing, feeling the ropes burn skin from his bare elbow. His breath jolted out. An unintentional fall into the net was not—not in the least—like the deliberate drops he had been taught to make! He lay there, shaken, and surprised, and above him Mario swung head down, laughing.

  “See? Big difference between falling in and diving in! Come up and try again?”

  “Soon as I get my breath.”

  “And hang on to the bar a little longer. You broke too fast. Wait for my call next time.”

  Tommy went up, swung again, missed again. And a third time. By this time he had bruises already darkening on both shoulders, and the stiff ropes of the net had rubbed his left knee and right elbow bare. They stung like burns. He was painfully discouraged, his eyes smarting.

  “One more time,” Mario called down.

  “I don’t think I’m going to get it.”

  “What are you, a quitter? Get up there! And you’re still letting go too fast. Get right out there to the end of the swing!”

  This time Tommy’s wrists actually brushed Mario’s hands. Then, just as he felt the sudden thrill of success, he lost his grip before their wrists locked; he grabbed in a panic and his elbow struck Mario in the face. He fell, twisting over quickly on his back, and something struck hard beside him. As he untangled himself, wincing—he had rope burns now on both elbows—he saw Mario sitting up groggily in the net beside him. Blood was trickling down his face.

  “Mario, your nose! It’s bleeding—”

  “God damn it, I know that!” It was the first time Mario had forgotten himself enough to swear; like all performers who work in a field where the main audience is children, Mario was careful of what he said before the public—and somehow this forgetfulness gave Tommy an odd little lift, as if he were no longer an outsider, a child to be guarded.

  “I’m sorry, Mario. It was my fault. I lost my balance—”

  “You grabbed. I told you about that.” Mario pulled the resin-stiffened handkerchief out of his waistband—they all carried them, to wipe sweat from palms on the slippery riggings—and mopped at his face.

  “That lady who wrestled tigers for a living ought to take you on someday!” He added, roughly, “No, you didn’t knock me off; I felt my nose start bleeding and let go. That’s finished me for
this morning. I’ve got to go get some ice on this or I’ll be bleeding all through the matinee. Scram.”

  “Can’t I do anything? Get you some ice from the drink stand?” He stood by, feeling helpless, as Mario got down from the net.

  “No, no, just put your sweater on before you catch a chill. Don’t make such a big thing of it—this is all in the day’s work. Or doesn’t it seem like so much fun anymore?”

  Tommy braced himself against the sarcasm, wrapping himself in his sweater. “I guess if you can take a few thousand falls I can take a few dozen. Anyhow, I almost had your hands that time.”

  Mario drew the bloody handkerchief away from his face, laughing. “I guess you’ll do. Don’t forget to put something on those rope burns, ragazzo. Your mother probably has some stuff for burns. Here—” He fumbled at the neck of his shirt. “Come here a minute.”

  He was removing a tag from the shoulder seam of his shirt, a little metal oval, fastened there with a safety pin. He bent over and pinned it into the neckband of Tommy’s shirt.

  “What’s that?”

  “My Saint Michael’s medal. Patron saint of flyers. Wear it for luck, okay?”

  Embarrassed, Tommy touched the little metal thing with a curious finger. “I’m not a Catholic.”

  “Well, I am, and I’m going to be catching you, so maybe Saint Michael will look after you to keep me from breakin’ my neck!” Suddenly, under the slanted eyebrows, Mario smiled. Not the usual devilish grin, but a shy, boyish smile. He touched his bleeding face again. “I better get some ice on this, and you ought to have something on those burns. Run along, Tom.”

  Tommy went, touching the little medal curiously. He did not know then that he was to wear it for the rest of his life, never devoutly as Mario did then, but simply because he associated it, then and after, with his first taste of real flying. And for the indistinct knowledge—never wholly articulate—that for this sudden comradeship, this unexpected warmth through the roughness Mario usually showed him, he would have taken a thousand falls.