It was the only promise to one another they never broke.
~o0o~
They opened in Brownsville, Texas, on a soggy, steamy, hot afternoon. Tommy had a dozen small chores in the first half of the show: He stood at the foot of the web and steadied the rope for one of the women in the aerial ballet, he cleared the ring of props after a team of performing dogs, he stood by and held hoops and balls for a juggler. The matinee was filled with mix-ups and mistakes. Two clowns collided and left one another with bumps and bruises (the audience, of course, thought it was moderately funny and laughed), and a new rigger left two ropes unfastened. Consequently, the flying act had to be held up for fifteen minutes, the clowns improvising, faking and muttering curses in the ring below, while Mario and Angelo, hot and angry, climbed up to fasten them properly.
All during the evening performance, clouds were gathering. The word had been passed for a quick performance, but the performers gathered behind the entrance, scanning the sky and making gloomy predictions about whether or not the clouds would burst in the middle of the show. A good-sized hunk of the audience left during intermission, anyway.
As they were getting ready for the flying act, Angelo stepped to the door of the rigging truck and held a finger into the wind.
“Good Lord,” he muttered. “Tommy, you watch the ropes like a hawk! With that wind they’ll twist if you give them half a chance. We’ll have to skip the duo routines; somebody should stay on the board to handle the bar for every cross.”
“Okay.” Tommy tried to be casual, but he felt the queer little lump in his throat that he knew was fear. He had never worked before in a high wind, and he knew how performers hated it—with good reason.
“Well, the season’s off to a flying start, anyway,” Angelo said cheerfully, “Shoulders still sore?”
“A little.” Tommy was covering up his bright-pink forehead with the neutral-tinted powder.
Angelo grinned. “Shame to cover up all those real sexy freckles.”
“Wha-at?” Tommy spluttered.
“That new girl in the aerial ballet—I heard her talking at rehearsal. She said, “‘That sunburned kid, the redhead in the flying act—doesn’t he have the sexiest freckles you ever saw?’”
Tommy muttered, “Lay off.” He’d been teased enough about how good he looked in tights; he had begun to realize that flyers were like a magnet to the women in the show—and to the audience. Even the gray-haired and grandfatherly Papa Tony was always knee-deep in female admirers.
Mario was struggling one-handed with his wrist guard. Papa Tony went and stood behind him. “Is that wrist still bothering you, Matty?”
“It’s okay, but wearing the tape all the time keeps it rubbed raw. Get me the alcohol, will you, Tom?”
Tommy handed down the bottle. “Want me to fix it up?”
Mario let Tommy dab the raw spots with alcohol, then cover the wrist with a thin layer of cotton and gauze before strapping it again with adhesive tape under the regular muslin strapping. Papa Tony watched, scowling, as he fastened the leather guard over it.
“No more nonsense of working with a wrist rubbed raw, Matt. Tomorrow you find a doctor in town and have it looked after.”
“It doesn’t bother me when it’s wrapped up, Papa.”
“Nevertheless. You are not to run around all season with an infected wrist again because of carelessness at the start, hear me?”
“Yes, Papa! Just as you say.” Mario looked angry and apprehensive. “God! Listen to that wind!”
“If it gets worse, we will have to cut the flying act. Even so, you had better not try the pirouette return. We will finish with a double,” Papa Tony said. “Let me hear the routine for the shortened show, children.”
With the dropping of the weighted cape on his shoulders, Tommy began to feel that twisting little sickness down inside him. These last minute checks were always tight, tense.
As they stood in the performers’ entrance, Angelo glanced off to the north. “Thunder,” he said.
“What if it starts to rain while we’re on the rig?” Tommy asked.
“Then we get down the best way we can, before the bars get too slippery to hold us, and hope the audience is too busy running for shelter to watch us doing it,” Mario said.
“One good thing about playing outdoor shows,” Angelo said, “you can quit if it starts raining hard. Under canvas, you have to keep going, even if the rain and wind are coming in so hard you can hardly see the bars. And up in the top of the tent, believe me, it gets pretty wet sometimes. I remember once when we were with Starr’s—”
“Hold it,” Papa Tony said, listening to the band. “We’re on. Andiamo . . . .”
Briefly Tommy fingered the St. Michael’s medal pinned inside his neckline. As they started crossing the lighted ring, Angelo murmured, “Take it easy.” Tommy stood on the board between Mario and Papa Tony, hearing the applause for a moment before he pushed it all out of his mind again. Mario gave him a quick, tight grin.
“Easy, Lucky. Remember, it’s just like the practice room.” He pulled down the bar, said out of the corner of his mouth, “Watch the ropes,” and swung out, a clean, arrow-straight line. Tommy drew a deep breath. He was where he wanted to be.
The finale was barely over, and the audience not yet dispersed, before the work hands were swarming over the field, hustling to get everything stored before the storm broke. The family trailers, and some of the equipment trucks, had been pulled out all during the second half of the show, each act, as its turn closed, hitching up and pulling away to get an early start toward the next pitch. Now the heavy rigging truck pulled out on the field, and Tommy, quickly scrambling out of his tights inside, pulled on dungarees and a sweater. He worked alongside Mario and Buck, the Lambeth rigging man, carefully wiping poles and bars dry before storing them, taking a hand at rolling the net into its proper neat bundle. If anything got wet or muddy, it meant endless trouble, possibly expensive replacements or dangerously rotted ropes.
Before they had finished, Tommy’s mother came looking for them, her feet thrust into boots, a scarf tied over her head. The rain was beginning to come down, thick and splashy.
“Looking for Tommy, Beth?” Angelo asked. “He’s inside the truck.”
Beth Zane thrust her head into the rigging truck. “Can you leave now? Your dad’s already gone with the cage truck, and I’m ready to pull out with the trailer.”
“We’re not quite through,” said Mario, wiping his face. “He can ride with us—you don’t have to wait if you don’t want to. Okay with you, Tom?”
“All right,” Beth said. “See you in the next town, Tommy.” She hurried away, splashing through puddles like a busy duck.
Buck said, “You could’ve let the kid go, Matt. We’re about through here.”
“That’s okay. Angelo, there’s Papa with the trailer—you go ahead, why don’t you? Tommy and I will ride with the rig truck.”
Angelo hurried away, and Buck stuck his head out, turtling his neck into the blue collar of his work shirt. “Jeez, it’s going to be raining like hell, come five, ten minutes! Let’s pull out before the field gets too muddy, okay? Everything all tied down inside here?”
Mario looked around. “Yeah, I guess so.” Inside the truck, every pole and bar of the flying rig and the other aerial acts transported here had been carefully stowed in its proper place, the collapsible board the Santellis used for a dressing table folded up on one end, covering the mirror. There was only a small space at the center, containing Buck’s rolled-up mattress—when he could not find a cheap room in town, he slept in the truck.
“All set? Here, give me a hand with the doors,” Buck called. “You kids want to ride up front?”
“No, we’ll ride back here, maybe catch a nap—okay, Tom?”
“Sure.” Tommy went to help with the heavy sliding doors. The lot, bare in the single spotlight remaining at the center, was desolate, only a few scattered papers and trampled popcorn bags remaining in the pou
nding rain. Most of the other trucks had gone. Jim Lambeth, coat collar pulled up over his head, ran toward them.
“Rig truck set to go?”
“All clear,” Tommy called, as he had heard Mario do a hundred times.
“Okay, that’s it, then. Strike the light, Smitty,” Lambeth shouted. The big spotlight on the generator truck went out, and it was no longer a circus lot—just a big, bare, rain-pounded empty field, lit only by a sudden sheet of lightning. Buck slammed the door and Tommy heard the bar slide shut.
It was black dark inside the truck. Mario pulled a flashlight from his pocket and flashed it quickly around. “Here, we’ll sit on Buck’s mattress.” He pulled off his muddy boots. “Get your sneakers off, Tom, we don’t want mud all over the place.”
The truck began, slowly, to move. Mario stowed his boots in a corner, then tossed the damp sneakers after them. They heard the wheels splashing through mud, the gears grinding, the rain hard and heavy on the metal roof. Mario yawned heavily.
“Damn,” he said, “with the rain and all, we never stopped for supper, and by the time we hit Newton it’s going to be one, two o’clock—everything’ll be shut up tighter than a hard-boiled egg. Hungry?”
“I’ll manage.”
“Have half of this, anyhow.” Mario flashed the light again, dug in the drawer where they kept their makeup, and fished out a large-sized candy bar. He broke it and gave half to Tommy.
Unwrapping his half, Tommy asked, “How’d you happen to have this?”
“Got in the habit in ballet school. Some of the girls—Liss was about the worst—would skip breakfast, or forget to knock off for lunch, and start fainting all over the place, so I got in the habit of carrying a chocolate bar around with me all the time. And while there was sugar rationing, I’d pick one up any time I saw one in a store, just in case.”
The thunder snapped loudly and Tommy said in the darkness, “What if we get hit?”
“Safest place in the world, in a thunderstorm, is inside a moving car. You’re grounded on the rubber tires, or something.”
The wind whistled, and sharp little blasts came through the cracks around the metal doors as the truck built up speed on the highway. Mario said suddenly, “Look, I said a couple of days ago we’d talk. This is the first chance we’ve had without people around. I haven’t been trying to dodge it, I just don’t know what to say to you.”
Although Tommy had not thought of it once since the day of the fumbled rehearsal, he knew exactly what Mario was talking about. A dozen questions brimmed over in his mind, but he was ashamed to ask. Finally he said, “When I was a little kid my father said something about—about queers. Only he made it sound nasty. You called it something else.”
“Homosexual.”
“I guess. He was—he was trying to scare me about it.”
“I didn’t notice you were so awful scared.”
Tommy said fiercely, “Anything you wanted me to do wouldn’t—wouldn’t scare me!”
Mario touched his hand lightly in the dark. “Thanks. No, I wouldn’t—wouldn’t ever want to scare you. Or hurt you. But I’m glad you know it.”
“My dad acted like—like those guys, queers, homo—homosexuals went around grabbing kids—like, if I ever went anywhere near one of them . . . .”
Mario sighed. “I don’t know anything about that kind of people. Maybe there are some men like that. I don’t know—I never met one. I—I never touched anybody who wasn’t ready to go along with the whole idea. A homosexual doesn’t have to be a—a pervert. A homosexual is just a man who likes other men. Instead of women.”
“You mean—that way. The sex way.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re homosexual?”
“Yes. I always was.”
Tommy thought about that for a minute. Then he said, “I guess I ought to tell you. That wasn’t the first time I—I ever did that with another boy. So I guess that makes me one, too, doesn’t it?”
Tommy felt, though he could not see, Mario’s quick glance at him in the darkness of the truck.
“How old were you? Or, I mean, how old was the other guy?”
“I guess we were both about eight. Maybe nine—”
“Oh, hell, no, Tommy. What did you do, jerk each other off? Look, all kids go through that stage. Boys, anyway. I don’t know anything about girls—I never asked. It doesn’t mean anything, one way or another.” He hesitated. “Look, don’t answer this unless you want to. Ever had a girl?”
Tommy stared into the darkness and muttered, “Not really. I almost did once. I mean, this girl and I were sort of fooling around, last year. This girl—well, she lets boys do things with her—”
“Rosa? Yeah,” Mario said, “everybody with the show knows about her—she must have screwed everything in pants on the lot. Maybe you’re lucky nothing happened; she’s probably got everything there is to catch. Papa Tony said if he caught her near the truck again he’d knock her block off, and if Angelo or I had anything to do with that one, we better get checked up by a doctor right away. So what happened? Couldn’t, or didn’t want to?”
“A little of both, I guess. She—she laughed at me and asked if I was queer.” And a taunting ghost flashed across his mind, Jeff Marlin asking with a dirty snigger, “How’d you like to be my girl? . . .”
But Mario was laughing. “She would! Hell, no, kid, that’s not how you find out!” Then, more gravely, “No, Tom, that doesn’t mean a thing, except that she was the wrong girl for you. It’s only if you’ve had lots of chances with different girls, girls you really like, and you still want men instead.”
Girls you really like. Suddenly Tommy thought of Stella the day they had driven the MG, wet and laughing in his arms, and how he had held her later, for a moment, naked under her thick robe. He knew, with a sudden, almost physical memory, what he had wanted then. He started to say something, then didn’t. There wasn’t any way to say something like that, not without giving the wrong impression. Mario might have thought Stella was like that Rosa jane. And she wasn’t. Not at all.
Even if she and Johnny were sleeping together, Stel isn’t like that . . . . But Mario didn’t like women. He wouldn’t understand.
Mario said quietly, “Some men—not very many, maybe, but some—will go to bed with other men when they can’t get women. Like sailors. Or in jail. But unless they like men better even when they can get women, they aren’t really—really homosexual.”
There was another long silence, filled only with the hard, metallic rain. “Tom, that was a low-down, filthy trick I pulled on you the other night. In the car like that.”
“I could’ve stopped you if I didn’t want you to. I knew that. Like the night you—you slept in my room. You weren’t really asleep, either, were you?”
“No,” Mario said, “I just wanted you to think so.”
“Like I said . . . I guess I—I kind of wanted you to.”
“You know,” Mario said, his voice gentle, “you could have gotten me into terrible trouble. You’re not really old enough—”
“Why would I want to get you into trouble?”
“Well, if I’d hurt you. Or scared you.”
“You keep talkin’ about scaring me. What’s to be scared of?”
Mario reached out and squeezed his hand in the darkness. There was another long silence. Finally Tommy said, “Don’t you care at all for girls? Or can’t you—”
“I can,” said Mario dryly, “and I have. I simply don’t care that much about it. I have nothing against girls—some of them I like a whole lot—but I simply get no particular kick out of screwing them. There are lots of things I like better, that’s all.”
Tommy started to ask what, which, how, but suddenly realized he didn’t really want to know. The conversation had already gone a little too far for the present state of his emotions. Simultaneously he wanted to know and was afraid and ashamed of what would come then. His imagination troubled him with formless things. He wanted to change the subject but
couldn’t let it drop.
“Have you always been like that, Mario? Or am I too nosy?”
“I don’t mind telling you anything you want to know. I wish—Christ, how I wish there’d been somebody to tell me when I was about your age. I’m just trying to think how to say it so you’ll understand. It’s sort of like trying to tell somebody how to fall in the net. It’s something you get to feel in your guts, that’s all.”
“Did it—did it start with somebody you liked a whole lot making a—making a pass at you?” What he really meant was like you did with me, but he couldn’t make himself say it.
Briefly and bitterly Mario laughed. “No. In my case it was somebody I didn’t really like that much at all.”
Distressed, Tommy wondered how you could do things like that with somebody you didn’t like. After a minute he asked it, just like that.
Mario’s voice was suddenly shaking. “That’s the riddle of the universe, kiddo. The wisdom of lost Atlantis, or something. Why the hell you go out and screw people you can hardly stand the sight of afterward.”
“But—” Tommy felt as he might have felt if, in midswing, he suddenly realized the net was broken beneath him.
“Tom, what’s the matter? This is a heck of a conversation to be having with a kid your age. I’m making an awful hash of it, I guess. What’s the matter? Did I say something that upset you?”
Tommy blurted, “I—I wouldn’t do it—unless I liked somebody, that’s all.”
“Then you’re goddamn lucky,” Mario muttered. Suddenly he drew in a harsh breath.
“Oh, Christ! What a jerk I am. What a goddamn nitwitted dumb—Tommy, listen. No, come here and listen to me—” He put an arm around the resisting shoulders. “Tom, for Christ’s sake, did you think I was talking about you? Trying to find some sneaky way of telling you I didn’t like you that much? Don’t you know—ah, come on, kid, don’t act like that!” By main force, he pulled Tommy close to him.
“Listen, Tom,” he said, in a strained whisper. “‘You know what used to bother me most when I first realized I was—was queer? Knowing I’d probably never have kids of my own. I never was—never was awful close to either of my brothers. Johnny and I always fought like hell, and Mark—well, we just lost each other. But from the first day I started working with you, it was like—sort of like if one of my brothers had been the way I always wished they could have been. Really close to me, really liking me. You know something? When I started getting—getting excited about you, I kept telling myself I just liked you too much to start up the—the other stuff, the sex stuff, that it was better just having you like—like a little brother I could—could—” His voice broke, and he said, almost in a whisper, “could love—”
The Catch Trap Page 23
