The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “You must have strong hands, sonny. Just good luck that finger wasn’t broken in a dozen places. Can you move the next one? Hmmm, good.” The doctor put a thick bandage and a small metal splint on it. “Car door, huh? That happens a lot.” He got out a needle and gave Tommy a tetanus shot. “You two kids from the circus? Hey, I saw that show last night. Aren’t you from the trapeze act? You’re the two who did that trick swinging on the same trapeze. That hand’s going to keep you off the trapeze for a couple of weeks, sonny. Are you two boys really brothers? You don’t look alike at all.”

  “Half brothers,” Mario said. His face was twisted and pale. “Is his hand going to be all right?”

  “I should think so. If he gives it a rest. Take him to a doctor in a couple of days, wherever you are, and have these dressings changed.” He shook some pills into a bottle. “That thing’s really going to start hurting in about ten or twenty minutes, when the numbness wears off.” Tommy wondered how it could hurt any more than it did now and how he’d keep from bawling like a baby if it did. The doctor gave the pills to Mario and said, “Have him take two of these right away when he gets home and one every four hours after that. You’ll be looking after him?”

  “I do a hell of a job of looking after him, don’t I?” Mario said, and he was almost crying.

  “If you’re going to drive back,” the doctor said dryly, “perhaps I’d better give you a sedative, too, young man.”

  Tommy managed to pat Mario’s arm with his unbandaged hand. “Mario, don’t. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. Don’t feel so bad.”

  Mario scowled and flung off his hand with the repressive frown Tommy had learned to recognize. He took out his billfold. “No, thanks, Doctor, I can’t take anything that would make me dopey; I’ve got a show this afternoon. What do we owe you?”

  Walking across to the car, Tommy felt so sick and giddy he thought his legs would give way under him. He took Mario’s arm, only to steady himself, but Mario shook him off. “Watch it, watch it,” he warned sharply, and Tommy drew away. On the way back to the grounds, Tommy only wanted to give way to the giddy sickness, to put his head in Mario’s lap and let the pain have its way, but instead he sat straight and cold, fighting it.

  “Listen, Mario, if you keep being such a goddamn bastard to me everybody’s going to know something’s wrong. So we had a row and you slammed the door on my hand. I know goddamn well you didn’t do it on purpose, but you’re actin’ like you did. Come on,” he begged suddenly, weakness and pain overcoming him, so that he began to cry, “don’t be mad, Mario—”

  “I’m not mad, I’m not mad. But don’t be such a goddamn baby! You can’t do that kind of thing in front of people. Cuddling up to me in the waiting room, crawling all over me in the examining room there—damn it, I told you often enough—”

  “Yeah, you told me, and you can go straight to hell!” Tommy stared out the window, tears of pain and fury drying on his face. When they got to the lot he took the pills the doctor had given him, answered the concerned questions with “It was kind of an accident; the door got shut on my hand,” and let Angelo cut his meat for supper. In the intermission of the night show Angelo brought him a pint carton of ice cream; Tommy had gone to bed, waiting for the pills to work. He went to bed without looking at Mario or answering his whispered good-nights.

  He was out of the act only eight days, but they were like a month of tedium and boredom. With his right hand immobilized, he couldn’t even do his regular work in the first half of the show, and Mario and Angelo divided it up between them without protest. On the third day Angelo took him to a doctor in the next town to have the dressing changed and the blackened nail removed, an ordeal from which Tommy emerged nauseated with pain and white as death—white enough to scare Angelo, who complimented him on his bravery on the way back to the car. He stopped on the way home to buy Tommy a box of candy and repeated the comments on his bravery that night at supper, which embarrassed Tommy more than the faint. With anguish Tommy remembered how Mario had even shaken off a hand to steady him, where Angelo had carried him to the car, his arms clutching Angelo’s neck, without a moment’s thought.

  That night Mario slipped to his side and tried to coax and pet him into a good humor, but Tommy turned his back to the wall and pretended to be asleep. Mario said at last, in a taut, furious whisper, “Okay, you little bastard. Hell can freeze over before I come crawling to you again!”

  Even when he got back to work, his hand throbbed fiercely every time he gripped it around the bar. The first night he was back in the act he fumbled a catch and took a mean spill into the net, giving himself a rope burn on the elbow that hurt as badly as his hand. Papa Tony hissed, “You clumsy clown!” as he climbed to the platform again, and Tommy set his mouth, shaking, somehow managing to keep his face serene, turning to the stands with a saucy wave as if the spill had been arranged on purpose to give them a fright. He ignored Mario’s quick, concerned, “You okay, kid?”

  The next day, at practice, he fumbled again as he started to climb the ladder, and Angelo motioned him down.

  “Is your hand still that sore? Think you ought to stay out of the act another day or so?”

  “Heck, no,” Tommy said defiantly. “Think I want it to stiffen up on me?”

  “No, but we don’t want you to get yourself hurt, either,” Mario said. He came and picked up Tommy’s hand, gently flexing the fingers back and forth, moving each joint between his own strong fingers, exploring the sore muscles and discolored patches. Tommy stood there without moving or looking up at him. Mario finally said, “If he wants to go on, Angelo, it won’t hurt.”

  “That’s all you know about it,” Tommy muttered.

  “I mean,” Mario said coldly, “it won’t do your hand any permanent damage.” He dropped Tommy’s hand and walked away.

  “Well, if you’re going on tonight, you better try that catch again,” Angelo told him and sent him up to the platform.

  After practice Papa Tony delayed him at the foot of the rigging. “Look, figlio, don’t you think you’ve stayed mad at Matt long enough? He told me how he hurt your hand. You think he did it on purpose? Don’t you know us well enough to know none of us would do a thing like that? No, mai—never—not in a hundred years! Now, come on, it’s only little kids hold grudges like that—grow up a little, hey? You go to him like a man, shake hands with him, give him a chance to say he’s sorry he hurt you, be friends again, okay? Like you were. Brothers. I don’t like to see you and Matt like this; you always did get along so good. I want you two kids to be like you were. You do that for me, Tommy, huh?”

  Tommy swallowed hard. “Sure,” he said at last, “I’ll tell him.” He flew off to where Mario was glumly changing in the trailer.

  He said shakily, to Mario’s turned-away back, “Papa Tony said—he doesn’t want us to—to go on holding a grudge. He said he wants us to be”—suddenly, he knew he was going to cry—“he wants us to be like we were. Won’t you?”

  “Oh, God!” For once wholly careless, Mario whirled and caught Tommy in a hard hug. “Oh, God, won’t I! Won’t I, kid!”

  During the interval between shows that afternoon the older men watched them working together behind the trailer, hanging up wet tights, laughing and kidding each other as usual, linking arms as they walked off to the midway for a cold drink. Papa Tony beamed approval; Angelo, however, watched with a curious, narrowed frown. Nothing so tangible, yet, as suspicion—only a sense that the quarrel, and the reconciliation, were more intense than they should have been.

  It was harder than ever to find even a moment together, and twice, frantic with the need for each other, they took the terrible risks they had promised each other never to take. Once, very late, Mario slipped across to Tommy’s bed in the dark, and lay down beside him. He held a warning hand over Tommy’s mouth throughout, not to stifle but to warn away any betraying sound. It seemed to Tommy then, as he pressed his lips together to avoid even breathing loudly, that they had reached the dept
hs—but they had not. A few days later, desperate for even a moment together, they clung to each other for a few minutes behind the locked door of a filthy restroom in a roadside service station. Mario looked so spent afterward, so hangdog miserable, that even Tommy, usually so inventive in ways of cheering him, could find nothing to say; there was only the dumb ache, the misery. They were riding on the back of one of the open equipment trucks; as they climbed to the top again, Mario burst into furious, bitter self-flagellation.

  “Dirty kids,” he flung into the rushing wind along the highway, “playing filthy games in filthy corners—you ought to hate me for letting you in for all this hell! If I had a grain of decency—”

  Tommy did not try to argue with him. He only squeezed Mario’s hand with helpless, painful love. For these horrible interludes only lessened the tension in his body; they did nothing for the worse and more painful tension like a tight fist under his breastbone, which he thought of, vaguely, as an ache in his heart.

  That night he did the thing he had never dared before, the one thing Mario had specifically and in so many words forbidden him to do. If Mario broke his own rules for them, he need not obey them blindly, either. After the trailer was dark, Papa Tony snoring softly in the back room, he came and slid into bed beside Mario. Mario whispered furiously, “You crazy?”

  “Mario—no, listen to me, please—please. It’s okay. We don’t have to—I mean, I just want to—just let me—let me lie here beside you a few minutes. Please. We get so worked up over—over all the other stuff, and never have any time to—to—oh, God damn it, I sound like some dame in a damn dumb jerky movie—I never have any time just to love you. Please just let me lie here and—and love you?”

  Mario’s arms went around him. For a moment of utter horror, Tommy thought Mario was laughing at him; then he felt the trembling in Mario’s shoulders. “You poor, poor kid.” He kept whispering it, hopelessly, like a litany. “You poor damn kid, you poor damn kid.” He rocked him softly, like a child, whispering unintelligible endearments. “I’m such a rotten bastard, you poor baby.”

  “Please, Mario. It’s all right. Just—just go to sleep. I won’t fall asleep here, and if I do, I’ll swear I was lonesome and just pestered you till you let me come and sleep with you. Please.” He held himself close against Mario till the older boy relaxed, and drew him tight, kissing him softly. And by miraculous luck no one heard when, in the dark hour before dawn, Tommy began to giggle softly, for of course they had ended by making love—and he wondered if he had known, all along, that it would end this way.

  CHAPTER 16

  And then, as unbearable situations usually do, things eased off and got better. Perhaps sensing the overtones of strain, perhaps only seeing that Mario was depressed, Papa Tony put the two of them hard at work learning the midair flying pass. This trick required them both to be in the air at the same time, one grasping the bar for return as the other left it. It seemed inevitable that they would tangle or collide in midair and kick one another in the face, and sometimes they did. Angelo had protested that this routine was far beyond Tommy’s present ability, and Tommy himself began to be discouraged, for they spent hours working at it and never managed to do it precisely right. They were not to do it well enough to perform in public for another year.

  But the time was not wasted. Now that they were working hard together, the personal tension between them simply drained away. As always when it was a question of their work, an odd, impersonal tone began to color their companionship again. Where, a few weeks before, a harsh word from Mario had made Tommy bite his lip to keep back tears, now, as in the early days of their training, it was all impersonal again. They practiced until they were exhausted, Tommy shaking with fatigue, Mario flaring into irritable rages, calling him stupid, clumsy, hopeless. But they laughed and kidded each other on the long runs between towns, yelled at each other about misplaced shoes and sweaters, and bickered good-naturedly about housekeeping chores without the slightest strain. Tommy realized, one night, that for three weeks altogether, after the night performance, they had eaten their late supper, cleaned up the dishes, and fallen into bed with no more personal word or touch than the brief, ritual handclasp between their beds. On a couple of evenings, alone and secure, they had simply stood together in the door of the rigging truck, Tommy’s arm around Mario’s waist, and it had seemed only peaceful, companionable.

  A couple of nights later, dressing for the evening show, Mario said abruptly, “I’m feeling lucky tonight. Want to try and finish up with a triple tonight, Angelo?”

  “It’s your neck,” Papa Tony said. “Tell the director before we go on, though, so he can announce it beforehand.” Tommy felt the tightness grip hard inside his chest; he fingered the little St. Michael’s medal nervously.

  Later, when the bandmaster started the low, ominous drum roll, Tommy glanced at Papa Tony. As always when Mario left the platform for one of the big tricks, the old man superstitiously turned his eyes away; he would not watch even the double. But Tommy could not take his eyes from the arrow-straight driving flight of the soaring body. Up—and back—and out again, higher and higher and— Oh, God, the swing’s going to buckle, you can’t take it that high—he came away from the bar and spun—one, two, three—the jolting grasp slid, elbow to wrist, and Tommy breathed again. He never heard the applause.

  While they were dressing after the performance a couple of fans came back for autographs, and Tommy, watching unheeded while they made a fuss over Mario, thought he would explode with the love and pride surging up in him. The emotion was so fierce that he felt sure the heat in his face must be visible. Papa Tony put a hand on his shoulder while Mario, outside the truck, was laughing and talking with the little cluster of enthusiasts.

  “You’re quiet, Tommy. Never mind, don’t be jealous—someday it’ll be for you, too.”

  Startled, dismayed—could Papa Tony possibly think he grudged Mario one scrap of the adoration?—he burst out, “Oh, no, no, Papa! It’s not that.” He flushed hotly, helplessly. “It’s just—he’s so—heck, I feel just as—as excited about it, about him, as they do, and—and I’m here with you and he’s my friend and it’s—it’s almost too much—I can hardly believe it, that’s all!”

  “I see.” The old man frowned slightly. “I wonder—” he said, but he didn’t finish. Mario swung up the steps in high good humor. Tommy started to speak and found himself unable to get out a word.

  “Ebbene, Signor Mario,” Papa Tony said curtly. “I suggest you collect your towels and your makeup case, unless you wish them to be scattered in the next haul. You never did find the mate to your green sock, did you?”

  Mario laughed exuberantly. “See, Lucky, in this family you don’t get full of your own importance. Papa’s bound and determined I’m not going to get a swelled head if he can help it.”

  He started to gather up his things, but Tommy said, “Please, let me—” He felt he would explode right then and there unless he could do something, somehow, to give visible form to the thing that was bursting in him—and this was the only thing he could think of. He gathered Mario’s scattered towels, his tights, and his discarded flying slippers, folded his robe and cape, then gathered together all the scattered small items on his shelf and put them into his makeup kit. Mario, splashing his face with cold water and running the comb through his crisp curls, paused to look up and catch Tommy’s eye with a smile, but Tommy dared not meet his eyes in the presence of the others.

  Three hours later, as they were settling down for sleep, Mario knelt, with a little whispered laugh, by Tommy’s bed.

  “Lucky? Listen, you know—it’s been a long time.”

  Tommy swallowed and said stupidly, “Well, we’ve both been busy.”

  “So you’re like me? When you have enough else to think about, you don’t miss it?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t miss it—” Tommy began with dignity, but Mario cut off the words with a quick, hard hug.

  “Listen, I haven’t decided t
o call the whole thing off, and I haven’t fallen for anybody else. I just figured no sense in pushing our luck for a while. You haven’t really minded too much, have you?”

  “No,” Tommy said honestly, “You’ve been so much nicer to me, other ways.”

  Mario said, with a soft chuckle, “Guess this cussed flying pass has tamed us both down a little.” He bent close to Tommy and whispered, “Just the same, enough’s enough. I heard Angelo go out—everybody with the show knows where he spends his nights—and Papa’s asleep this last hour. If we’re kind of quiet—”

  In spite of the quick physical leap of excitement, Tommy tensed under Mario’s hand sliding along his bare back. Would this start up another cycle of Mario’s frantic edginess and guilt, spiraling into the unendurable? He felt a little scared that Mario had relaxed his own rigid precaution. But this was all inarticulate, and he was pliantly happy when Mario slipped under his blanket. They did not speak again in words —they both knew the danger of that—but Tommy felt that Mario was telling him a great many things, just the same.

  During what Tommy now remembered as “the bad time,” they had had to take advantage of hurried moments; there had always been haste and—on Mario’s part, at least—a certain roughness which, combined with Tommy’s impatience and inexperience, had sometimes made their love-making almost more of a struggle than an embrace. He knew Mario could be gentle, too—even then there had been moments of tenderness and soft touches—but even at best there had been the frantic, frightened urgency. Now that, too, was gone. Tommy had the distinct impression that Mario had come to him tonight not out of his own hunger or need, but simply in response to Tommy’s overflow of emotion. Not since their first night in Oklahoma, the night of the great storm, had there been so much tenderness. And he felt hazily, as he slipped into sleep afterward, a sort of wonder that knowing Mario as he did, he could still feel all the resentment dissolve in this aching adoration and delight. He thought, I wish he could always be like this. But whatever way he is, I love him. When Mario stirred to leave him, he felt naked and bruised; he made no move to hold him, but sensing, perhaps, what Tommy wanted most, Mario moved closer to him again and held him till he slept.