“A fine idea,” said Papa Tony, parting his gray hair neatly by touch. “Are you boys agreeable?”
“If Angelo wants to drive, it’s okay with me,” Mario said, picking up Tommy’s damp trunks and rolling them into a towel with his own. “What about it, Tom? Mind sitting up all night?”
“I won’t be doing the driving,” Tommy shrugged, “so it’s all the same to me.”
“Now, that’s the way I like to see a kid act,” Angelo said with a grin. “Why can’t you be that agreeable, Matt?”
“You don’t ask me the right questions,” Mario retorted, rubbing his curly hair with a spare towel. “You look nice and cool, Tommy. I should have thought to bring along a pair of gym shorts, too.”
Papa Tony snorted, and Tommy looked at the floor self-consciously. In the heat and cramped quarters of the car, shorts had seemed to make more sense than his dungaree pants, but now he wondered if he had dressed unsuitably for the rest of the trip. He wouldn’t want to go into a restaurant dressed in shorts; he was pretty big for that. But Papa Tony said mildly, “Matt, on a child Tommy’s age they are perfectly suitable, but on you they would be absurd anywhere but at the beach. This thing today of boys wearing long trousers is ridiculous. When I was Tommy’s age, I was still teasing my papa for a single pair of long trousers to wear to Mass on Sunday. Now little boys wear long pants and grown men let themselves be seen in shorts, and it is all very stupid!”
The sun had gone down, but there was still a hot, blister-big wind in the dusty streets of the town. They stopped at a service station for gas and oil and to put air in the tires, and stood around in the dry hot wind, drinking tepid soda pop from bottles in an icebox. Tommy snitched a chip or two of ice from the box and stood crunching it in his teeth; it felt comfortingly cold to his mouth, colder than the bland orange soda.
Angelo climbed under the wheel. “I’ll drive first, Papa. How about it, Tommy, want to ride up front?”
Before Tommy could answer, Papa Tony said, “No, let the boys climb in the back where they can sleep if they want to. Mario has been driving all day and he is tired. And it is a long trip for a child; Tommy needs his rest.” He got into the front, with Angelo, and Angelo carefully steered the bulky car-and-trailer hookup onto the highway.
Mario was unwrapping a chocolate bar he had bought at the gas station. He broke off half and gave it to Tommy. “Let’s eat this before it melts. Good God, if it’s like this at the end of April, what’s it going to be in August!”
“In August we will be worrying about tornadoes in Kansas and thunderstorms in Arkansas,” Papa Tony said.
Angelo twisted his neck around briefly, teasing, “You eat too much candy, Matt. You’ll get too heavy for a flyer.”
“Look who’s talking!” Mario retorted amiably. “Who’s the family chowhound, anyway?”
Tommy crumpled up the candy wrapper and shoved it out the window. It blew away into the gathering dusk of the desert. He had never seen country like this—treeless, houseless, with nothing growing along the roads. He was used to rural areas with a mile or two between houses, ten or twenty miles between towns. But out here there seemed to be sixty or seventy miles between houses, and between them there was no sign of any human habitation, nothing but the paved ribbon of roadway to indicate that this was not some alien world from a Jules Verne story, wholly clean of life. They left the little town behind them at sunset, and before he saw another isolated farmhouse it was black dark, so that the lights shone, alien and distant, across the barren flat land. He sat leaning against the window frame, the cold metal against his hot forehead, his eyes straining ahead for anything beyond the lonesome range of the car lights. The country scared him, and he felt grateful when now and then a jack-rabbit broke from cover and scuttled quickly through the beam of the headlight to be lost again in the darkness. The moon was low on the horizon, a pale, faintly greenish crescent. Every time the road curved the crescent vanished behind one of the distant low hills and reappeared lower down; finally it disappeared and did not come back. The sky looked shabby and black, with a few stars twinkling like faded sequins on a discarded costume.
He heard Mario sigh restlessly and shift his feet in the darkness, then bend down to slip off the woven Mexican huaraches he wore. He had unbuttoned his shirt to the waist. Angelo struck a match; in the brief flare of light Tommy could see Papa Tony’s head, canted sideways, his mouth open, snoring slightly. Angelo whistled a little tune, just audible through the motor noise. Mario slid down and crossed his legs, yawned, shifted his weight again.
“You got enough room?” Tommy murmured. “Am I crowding you?”
“No,” Mario whispered, “but if you want to talk, slide over so we won’t wake up Papa Tony.”
Tommy slid closer to him, across the seat “I was just going to ask if you were asleep,” he whispered.
“No, not quite. You sleepy?”
“Some.” Mostly, staring out into the endless lonely darkness outside the car made Tommy strangely uneasy. He had never heard the word agoraphobia, but he was suffering vaguely from an uncomfortable fear of all that open space out there, and he felt better when he was close enough to touch Mario in the back seat.
“Well, you better get some sleep, anyhow. Here, lean up against my shoulder if you want to—lean back and get some rest, kid.”
In the front seat Angelo’s lighted cigarette went out. He was still whistling the aimless, endless little tune. Papa Tony snored. The lights went on swallowing up the endless distances ahead of the car.
Tommy found himself remembering the night when Mario had driven him home from the beach. This had the same quiet, rocking closeness. He shut his eyes and courted, deliberately, that same drowsy quiet. He let himself lean a little against Mario, and felt the sleepiness recede instead of advancing. Mario reached out and put an arm around him, and still in the pretense of resistless drowsiness, Tommy let his head fall into the hollow of the man’s shoulder. You jerk, he told himself, you big baby, you! You might just as well be sitting on his lap, like you were four years old. He was reminded of sitting on laps when he was small. Women had always smelled of face powder and fruity perfume; he had always liked better to sit on male knees.
He let the pretended drowsiness merge into a kind of half-sleep. Mario had never touched him before . . . . He blinked in the darkness, startled at his own thoughts. Working together, he and Mario brushed against one another continually on the rigging, gripped hands and wrists, were in one way or another almost always in continuous physical contact. They were always scuffling and wrestling, crowding and pushing at one another. But he felt suddenly that this was, really, the first time they had touched each other. No, the second. The first had been that night Mario came back from Santa Barbara. Of course there was also the night they drove back from the beach. But Tommy had been really too drowsy, then, to be aware of the contact He was very much aware of it now, his cheek resting against the soft, rough texture of Mario’s shirt. His hand was lying so that the back of his fingers rested against Mario’s leather belt; Mario’s thigh was closely pressed to his. Mario always smelled faintly of cloves, and very faintly of sweat, and just now he smelled a little of chocolate. Suddenly abashed by the closeness, Tommy stirred and murmured, pretending abrupt waking, and pulled a little away.
“It’s okay,” Mario whispered, his mouth close to Tommy’s ear. “Go to sleep.”
Tommy did not answer. He felt embarrassed again. But he did not move to his own side of the seat as he had started to do, and after a moment Mario drew Tommy down against his shoulder again. Tommy, feeling foolish for no reason at all, pretended to have dropped off to sleep; he did not snore, but he breathed a little more deeply. He really did feel sleepy now.
After a while, through the sleepiness, he became aware that Mario was, very gently, stroking his bare upper arm. He stirred faintly, and instantly Mario was completely still, his hand motionless on Tommy’s shoulder, as if he were only steadying the boy from falling off the seat arou
nd the motion of a curve.
Tommy did not move; he kept his eyes closed, his face pressed into Mario’s shoulder, in the darkness that was like the darkness of deep sleep. He heard Mario sigh and felt the deep, warm rise and fall of his chest Mario, too, might have been heavily asleep. And yet there was that curious, waiting, listening stillness in him.
Tommy felt that Mario was waiting for some sign from him, that Mario knew perfectly well that Tommy was not asleep but for some reason wanted to be sure he would continue to pretend that he was; the pretense of sleep had suddenly become very important. He stirred faintly again and sighed, and snuggled down a little closer, and felt that Mario was holding his breath. Suddenly the thought flashed across his mind: That night at the house. He knew I wasn’t asleep that night, too. Deliberately Tommy reached out and slid his arm behind Mario, holding himself against Mario, his face buried in Mario’s shoulder. He felt the effect of his movement like a signal, felt the soft, released breath against him, and felt Mario’s arm tighten, holding him hard for a moment. He kept his eyes closed, his face hidden. In the darkness, he felt Mario’s hands move on him, tighten around his waist, move lower, touch his bare thighs, slide up inside the loose leg of the gym shorts. Now, unmistakably, Tommy was aware of just what kind of excitement was stirring inside him—unexpected, undesired . . . but, strangely, not unwelcome.
A fleeting, half-angry memory touched him, of a sneaked, furtive experiment with a schoolmate, years ago . . . . Heck, we were just little kids, fooling around. Once his father had warned him that there were times when a boy had to be careful around other men. He had given them a name: perverts; he had made it sound disgusting, and Tommy had been torn between revulsion and, reluctantly, curiosity. As he grew older he had found the thought, somehow, irritatingly intriguing. He had heard the word queer, and had had suspected misfits pointed out to him by school friends. He had a vague idea from the conversation with his father that it was not wise to linger in public restrooms or unpleasant strangers might come and make unspeakable propositions.
But this was Mario, and Tommy realized again—as he had realized that night—that without knowing it, or knowing why, he had wanted Mario to touch him like this for a long time. As Mario’s fingers moved on him, rousing him to hard excitement, it seemed to him suddenly that all of the winter past he had revolved in a circle with Mario at the center, that he lived intensely only when Mario was within his sight or watching him, that the strange tension and restlessness in him had been moving, inevitably, to this very moment. He remembered, and even in the darkness his face burned, how he had. watched with embarrassing attention, and something he now knew to be jealousy, when Mario hugged or kissed his brother, and even with the memory he felt the mysterious excitement in his body deepen.
Mario’s hands moved on him, again, exploring between his legs, and Tommy’s breath caught; he wanted to giggle from sheer nervousness. He had no idea what would happen next. In the front seat Angelo was still whistling the aimless, monotonous little tune, a single maddeningly familiar phrase repeated over and over. Tommy felt wide awake now, and tense, almost frightened, and the erection was so hard now that it was almost painful. Through the other excitement and fright he felt suddenly quite scared on an ordinary level. What would happen if right now Angelo turned around or stopped the car? This was kind of a crazy thing for Mario to do.
Mario drew a long, deep breath. Tommy wondered if Mario was waiting for him to do something, expecting something from him, but he couldn’t think what. He didn’t want to think at all. He only buried his forehead a little more deeply in Mario’s shoulder, then shifted his weight so that his mouth was against Mario’s bare chest. The feel of the naked skin against his lips deepened the breathless excitement low in his body, and he found strange images moving in his mind, from nowhere, as his thoughts raced breathlessly . . . . I’d like to, I almost want to, I ought to—and blindly he reached out, seeking. Mario took Tommy’s hand for a moment and laid it against him and Tommy felt the hard, hot excitement there under his own hand, but he was still too unaware to do anything but hold his hand there, shaking. He was conscious of the motion of the car, swaying and bouncing over the rutted road, of Mario’s whole body pressing against him, of the jerky monotonous tune Angelo was whistling, which seemed to rise and fall and fade out almost in cadence with the touch that was blurring all other consciousness: Mario’s hands on him, hard, demanding, almost painfully insistent . . . . He felt himself become rigid, move involuntarily, his breath catching in what he did not at once identify as a convulsive sob. His ears were ringing and he felt light-headed, curiously relaxed. Under his cheek he could feel Mario’s breathing quiet to normal; then he bent down and the roughened chin rubbed softly against Tommy’s cheek. Tommy knew he was shaking, and was conscious of the warm stickiness in his shorts. Mario’s whisper was just a flutter of breath against his ear: “Okay, kid, okay. Ssshh. Go to sleep.” And after a moment he was asleep, his head still resting on Mario’s shoulder, the little tune still whistling into his dreams. Once, later—much later, he thought, for the blistering hot wind had turned damp and chilly—he roused slightly. The car had stopped, and he heard the high, metallic pinging of a gas pump. He sat up, dazed, seeing a neon sign flashing truck stop. Papa Tony was changing places with Angelo to drive, and Angelo leaned over into the back seat, asking in a half-whisper, “Either of you kids want something to eat? Soda pop—anything?”
Mario said in a whisper, “Nothing. I was asleep. Look, you woke up the kid here—” and Tommy felt Mario drawing him down against his shoulder again. “He’s fast asleep—look.”
And Tommy tumbled down into deeper, real, sleep this time.
CHAPTER 12
He had almost forgotten when they woke up in the cold, stiff grayness of dawn. They stopped for breakfast on the road, and Tommy, sitting between Mario and Angelo and cheerfully stowing away enormous quantities of pancakes and bacon, had not the slightest inclination to give a moment’s thought to anything that had happened during the night. He thought of it only briefly when they stopped at another truck stop to wash and change their clothes, and he noticed the faint stain still inside his gym shorts; but he stuffed them in the laundry bag without a second thought. Without that he might have thought it a rather odd and embarrassing dream and no more.
It was early afternoon when they pulled into the small town whose only claim to distinction was that it was the winter quarters of the Lambeth Circus. Already there were a dozen or so trucks and house trailers parked at the far end of the huge open space at the edge of the cotton fields. Trucks and wagons were drawn up in neat formation, half a dozen small tents had been set up, and the bleak order of winter quarters was giving way to the definite feel of a show getting ready to go on the road. Tommy dropped out of the Santelli car almost before it stopped, and streaked away toward the familiar house trailer belonging to his own family.
After hugs, shouts, and greetings, and a second breakfast with his parents, he emerged into the familiar pandemonium. Aerial riggings had been set up inside a large roped-off area. He heard the crack of whips as a strange man in walking shorts cued a group of horses running round and round a roughly marked-out ring. Inside the roped area a strange man and a small blonde woman, looking vaguely lost, were supervising the setting up of a revolving-ladder rigging. Tommy recognized acts from last year, too: The swinging ladders had been set up, and Margot Clane was holding the web for a girl in plaid shorts and a halter to climb up hand over hand. Tommy didn’t see Betsy Gentry at all. Little Ann, in a faded playsuit, was sitting on a prop box. Tommy started toward her, full of questions about the new act, but Papa Tony corralled him and sent him to find Buck, Lambeth’s regular rigging man, and help him set up and check their rigging.
“And don’t worry too much,” Papa Tony told him. “You will be on display with us, but I have told Lambeth you are a competent part of this act, and he knows me well. If Tonio Santelli says that you can fly”—he raised his chin and looked ver
y arrogant—“you need worry about nothing.”
He had never spoken in such a complimentary way, and Tommy felt overwhelmed. He swarmed up the rigging to help Buck with the ropes, feeling that he had never been so happy in his life.
In late afternoon he swung down from the rigging, where he had been checking the braces with a spirit level. Mario and Angelo had just come from their trailer, wearing practice tights. Tommy ran at Mario—as he had done a thousand times before—grabbed him from behind, and tried half seriously to throw him over before he could recover his balance. Mario stiffened instantly and pushed him away. “Quit that!” he said. “Quit your fooling around.” Tommy stared as if Mario had slapped him, his arms falling to his sides. He was far too young to be aware of the sudden shift in Mario’s awareness that had changed Tommy, abruptly, from a child to be played with or randomly teased, to a separate person from whom an unexpected touch may be meaningful or offensive but is, in any case, personal. Nor did it occur to him that Mario might have been afraid of betraying this change. He felt his face flooding with color and backed into Angelo. The older man grabbed and steadied him.
“Watch your feet, stupid! You have to play the fool the whole time? You want to fall and dislocate your wrist or something just before opening night? Scram and get your tights on—we’ve got to run through the act for Lambeth.”
Tommy ran off to change. When he returned, the Santellis were all at the top of the rigging, and Tommy climbed up to join them. He held out the bar to Mario, but he shook his head. “Go ahead. What you waiting for?”
“You always want to be first out.”
“Go ahead, damn it! I’ve got something wrong with this blasted wrist.” Under the cotton strapping of his wrist guard, Tommy noticed, Mario’s wrist was strapped in adhesive tape; he was fiddling with the end, twisting the muslin strips, trying with one hand and his teeth to strap a leather wrist protector over it. He scowled at Tommy and the boy felt almost physically bruised by the look. Suddenly, remembering, Tommy was overwhelmed by shame. He would have been able to forget the whole thing, take it as a sort of game, to be forgotten or ignored between them, had Mario been able to treat him exactly as usual; but now guilt and dismay overcame him. It did not occur to him—then or for years—what Mario was feeling. In a confused desire to put right whatever was wrong between them, and with a surge of affection, he touched Mario’s wrist lightly.
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