The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  His mother. His father.

  “Don’t cry,” Mario said, looking down at him, white and shaken. “I’m not going to be able to take it if you cry, Tommy—”

  “You knew. You knew all evening! You knew and you didn’t tell me—” It was a monstrous betrayal. Mario’s kindness, just to get him away from the lot, just to keep him from asking questions.

  “Don’t blame him,” Angelo said. “It was me said we ought to tell you after the show, when things quieted down a little, when we had time to—time to be with you—”

  “Hey, Santellis! Hurry it up there, we got to strike this top!” One of the colored work hands came up. “You through with these trunks, they ready to go?”

  “Sure, take them,” Angelo said, laying his own coat around Tommy’s shoulders. “Come on, kid, take it easy . . . .”

  That was what Coe Wayland was talking about. He just realized who I was and that I didn’t know yet . . . .

  Papa Tony put his arm around Tommy as they went out of the tent. He said, “This is not the time, either; maybe there is no right time. Ragazzo, I know it is no comfort to you now, but you must remember. You are not all alone. You have all of us; you have a family still. Now you are really my son.”

  Tommy put his head down for a moment on Papa Tony’s shoulder, feeling the coarse gray wool of the man’s sweater, the rough hands patting his back. But he did not cry. He was aware, vaguely, that they climbed on the shuttle bus from the lot out to the circus train. When the mists cleared he was alone in their compartment with Mario.

  “You knew. You knew and you didn’t tell me—”

  “It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, Tommy,” Mario said hoarsely. “I didn’t want to do it like that. Only there wasn’t any other way to handle it. Not with two shows coming right up.”

  “I know. That’s okay.” Tommy fumbled with his shoelaces.

  “Here. Let me help.” In the end Mario almost undressed him; then he held him gently until he slept.

  Once Tommy said, shaking, “Now you really got to be my brother. Now you’re all I got.”

  Mario’s voice in the dark sounded high, shaken. “That fortune in the cookie I wouldn’t show you. It said, You must resign yourself to an unpleasant duty. And there I was sitting on this. I could’ve killed Angelo. Fanciullo . . . can you ever forgive me?”

  “Sure,” said Tommy, almost in a whisper, “you had to. The damn fortune cookies are all crap anyhow, like you said.”

  The whistle sounded, long and mournful, as the circus train jolted into motion beneath them, the noise of the wheels harsh and clanking for a moment, then faster and faster, blending into a rumble. The long steam-whistle screech came again, and Tommy, looking out the window at the unknown town, realized he did not even know where they were, or where the news had reached him. He would never know.

  Again the sound of the train whistle screamed into the strange night

  Andiamo, me vo, ma non so dove . . . .

  “I’m going,” he muttered, “but I don’t know where . . . .”

  Mario’s arms closed around him. “It doesn’t matter,” he said gently, “you’re here with me. Does it matter where you are or where we’re going? So long as we go together?”

  Oh, God, what kind of a creep am I? I always want him to be like this with me, and then when he is, it has to be for something like this . . . and guilt overwhelmed him, that even in a time like this, he could only think of Mario’s unexpected tenderness.

  ~o0o~

  The season moved on, and the circus completed its first run through the West and headed toward the East Coast. The first week in August, Mario finally allowed the Waylands to announce his triple as a regular part of the act, and during the first six days he did it twice a day, and missed only once. Paul Mainwaring, the equestrian director, shifted the Santellis into the center ring on the strength of it, and if Mario was not now the acknowledged star of the circus (he had keen competition from the star of the French equestrian family, who did twisting somersaults from horse to horse at full gallop), at least he was the star of the aerial division.

  Papa Tony took all this with stoical sharp words, and his usual sarcasm, but Tommy sensed that beneath it he was bursting with pride. Tommy himself was so overwhelmed that it scared him. He once heard Angelo say good-naturedly to Coe Wayland, “Tommy? Oh, the kid worships the ground Mario walks on.” Though this had embarrassed Tommy so much that he picked a quarrel with Mario in the dressing tent, and in retaliation Mario pushed his head into a water bucket, on some corner of his thoughts Tommy realized, It’s true, I do—and God damn it, why shouldn’t I?

  Johnny addressed his brother ironically as Signor Mario, but Tommy knew that he, too, enjoyed, the reflected glory Mario had brought to them all. Mario said little, gave Angelo most of the credit, and behaved with an unassuming modesty which, irrationally, irked the other flyers. Coe Wayland once burst out, “Hell, the guy’s putting on one hell of a good act, that’s all! It ain’t human, not to strut a little! That modesty stuff is supposed to impress you more than a normal amount of pride!” And Tommy, about to speak up angrily in Mario’s defense, and controlling himself with a bitten lip, felt a guilty sting of doubt; after all, wasn’t Mario self-deprecating modesty more impressive than the cocky posing of other stars?

  Only in one place did Mario’s pride and pleasure over-flow; that was above the crowd, high on the pedestal, as he returned to the board. With one arm raised in salute to the applause, his slanting eyebrows made him look like some inhumanly exultant otherworldly being, released for a little while on earth to stun the earthbound. He was, at once, bowstring-tense and as relaxed as a cat. It never lasted more than the few minutes it took him to get to the dressing tent, where he would begin to shiver with the release of the inhuman tension and go into fits of absurd hilarity or angry depression. Moody and mercurial as he was, this was one time at which neither Angelo nor Papa Tony ever took occasion to call him down, and even Johnny kept his distance.

  Mario said once to Tommy as they dressed, “You know, kid, it’s damn near worth risking my neck, just to have them let me alone for a while afterward,” and Tommy felt a twinge of that painful inner knowledge. Mario, who never complained or rebelled under the harsh family discipline, perhaps chafed under it more deeply than anyone else.

  There were minor tragedies, and one or two major ones. A woman in the aerial ballet, for no apparent reason, lost her grip and fell forty feet; she was picked up and carried out of the ring, dying minutes later in the dressing tent. One of the Liberty horses suddenly bolted from the ring and plunged into the grandstand; there was a storm of panicky screams and spectators diving this way and that. The horse was recaptured, bruised but unhurt, a few minutes later, but a woman in the stands had fallen ten feet to the ground and was taken away on a stretcher. A careless cage boy somehow provoked an elephant, and was picked up twenty feet away with a concussion, after a mildly reproving tap from the elephant’s trunk.

  Late in July, Tommy was making his routine check of the net, testing its tension by jumping up and down in it, and nearby Mario had taken advantage of a spare minute to practice on the wire under Jake Davis’s critical eye. As he descended the ladder, laughing, he gave Tommy, coming out of the net, a playful push.

  “Jake says I’m ready for a two high. You’re still small enough for a top-mounter; want to try it?”

  “Heck, no,” Tommy retorted. “Wire walking is something like working the cats; you’ve got to be slightly nuts to try it. Ask Stella—she’ll try any idiot stunt anybody asks her to!”

  “I just might,” Mario said, laughing. “She’s skinnier than you are, and easier to carry.”

  “Well, don’t let Johnny hear you ask her,” Tommy said. Then, seeing that Johnny had climbed to the catch trap, he set his feet on the aerial ladder. One of the prop men was standing near the flying rig. He was not their regular rigger, but Tommy thought he looked, somehow, vaguely familiar. He was a small, oldish man, with a creas
ed sunburned face and a pronounced dragging limp—though he seemed nimble enough. His hair was a faded ginger color, but looked as if it might once have been as red as Tommy’s own.

  “Beg pardon,” he said as Tommy began to ascend the ladder, “but would you be the young man they call Mario Santelli?”

  Tommy shook his head. “No, that’s Mario over there, talking to Jake Davis.”

  “I am sorry, I rarely have the chance to watch the flying acts,” the man said. Though he was shabbily dressed in a worn T-shirt and faded dungarees, his accent was that of an educated man. In fact, it had a precise lilt which reminded Tommy faintly of Betsy Gentry or of Isabella Byrd’s father; it wasn’t quite American. Well, among the work hands and prop men, Tommy knew, there were any number of men who had dropped out of sight from some other life. You never got curious about anyone’s past.

  “I have been hearing that one of the young flyers was doing a triple nowadays, so I traded work with Sandy for this morning so I might perhaps have a chance to see him rehearsing,” the little man said, and Mario, hearing him, raised slanted eyebrows at him.

  “Want to see it? Okay, stick around a while.” Mario started climbing, calling to Johnny, at the far end of the rigging, “Isn’t Angelo out yet?”

  “He split a seam down the rear end of his tights. Had to hunt up a new pair,” Johnny called. “He’ll be along. Why?”

  “Because I want to try a triple, that’s why. Okay, pick it up—you’ve been tellin’ me all along that anything Angelo can do, you can do better. Let’s prove it,” Mario called. He was laughing recklessly, and Tommy glanced at him, frowning, as Johnny leaned back to lower himself into catching position.

  “You think it’s okay?” Tommy murmured.

  “Relax, Lucky. When Jock is good, he’s very, very good. You think you can handle the bar on the return?”

  Tommy looked at him skeptically. Normally, only Papa Tony was trusted for this, or, at home in the practice room, Lucia. “I’ll do my damnedest.”

  “Pick it up a little, Johnny. Okay, that ought to do it.” Mario wiped his hands carefully on the resin-soaked handkerchief.

  Tommy demanded sharply, “To impress one of the work hands?”

  Mario grinned. “Kid, where do you think you find the real circus fans? Of all the millions of places there are in this world to drop out of sight, why would anybody pick the circus unless it meant one hell of a lot to him? I bet that little gimp down there knows more about flying than any of the folks who pay six bucks for reserved seats.”

  Tommy fingered the small metal medal pinned inside his neckline, tensely watching Johnny’s clockwork swing. Yes, he’s got the timing okay. Mario’s grin slid off. He took the bar, swung out, back, up again, higher and higher. As always, Tommy drew in his breath and held it as man and trapeze fell apart and. Mario spun back into the first somersault, the second, the rushing third turn, then broke out and with a fast, locking grip, he and Johnny were swinging together. Tommy let the bar drop, but even as he did it, he knew it was too early; Mario knew it, too, and dropped from Johnny’s wrists directly into the net. Tommy pulled the bar in again on its hook, fastened it up out of the way, and somersaulted to the ground.

  The little man was still standing there, smiling vaguely.

  “May I congratulate you on a beautiful performance? Or are you superstitious about such things?”

  “Not at all,” Mario said, startled.

  “Would you mind telling me how old you are, my boy?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “So young? How long have you been doing that?”

  “Started trying when I was about nineteen, I still can’t do it consistently.”

  “No one can,” said the little man. “Eight out of ten is still, I believe, a record.”

  “Yeah, and nobody but Parrish and Fortunati ever got up to that,” Mario said. “I do it more like six out of ten, if I feel right.”

  “What made you decide to try it?” the little man asked suddenly.

  “God knows,” Mario said with a shrug. “Proving something, maybe.”

  The man nodded slowly. “What would life be, if there wasn’t something impossible to contemplate? Someday, perhaps, when you’re old, if you live so long, you will stand where I am standing now and watch some young fellow working to perfect four somersaults.”

  “Impossible,” Mario said with a grimace. “Can’t be done; it’s a physical impossibility. Not unless you put more space between the bars, and then the momentum wouldn’t keep you up.”

  The small sandy-haired man shrugged. “And yet, you know, I never have believed in limiting factors,” he said. “I believe that someday some athlete will manage to run a four-minute mile, and yet they say that is a physical impossibility. And someday some man will climb Mount Everest, in Tibet. And some man will do four somersaults to a catcher’s hands.”

  Mario snorted laughter. “You might just as well say some day man will go to the Moon!”

  “Even that should not be impossible,” mused the ginger-haired man. “I do not know why it should be impossible. If you do not believe in the impossible, why did you attempt the triple?”

  Mario laughed. “You got me. But I knew it wasn’t impossible; I saw Jim Fortunati do it when I was a kid, and I knew a couple of other guys had done it before him.”

  “And yet, you know,” the little man said, in his soft accented voice, “the triple was long believed to be impossible, something flesh and blood was never meant to do. The first time it was done, it was by accident, pure accident. Gerard Might did it, and he was dreadfully amazed when he lived through it; I heard him say so. He never tried it again; he would cross himself when he spoke of it. And circus managers used to give all kinds of impressive facts to prove the triple was physically impossible. One of them quoted all kinds of medical data about how the brain lost control after two and a half turns and would give up on the muscles. There was a flyer, once, don’t you know, who insisted on trying a triple, and this manager gave him a Christmas present intended to discourage him. They were in winter quarters in Houston then, and the manager drew up a long list of all those flyers who had tried to do a triple somersault—the salto mortale, he called it—either from a trapeze or from a springboard, and as a result were taking up lodgings in their respective cemeteries. The manager typed out this list, and he folded it up small, and he put it inside a deed to a cemetery lot, and he gave it to the flyer for Christmas. And yet, my lad, I have just watched you do a triple, and do it quite creditably, and who knows, perhaps some little fellow who watches you do that when he is just a child will grow up to believe that nothing is impossible, and will try to perfect a quadruple somersault to a catcher’s hands. Or climb Mount Everest or, who knows, manage to fly a spaceship to the Moon. No, nothing is impossible, lad. Not while there are still youngsters with open minds about breaking their silly necks.”

  Mario chuckled. “I think you’ve been reading too many Buck Rogers comic strips,” he said. “Anyhow, my mind’s quite closed on that subject: I have a distinct objection to breaking my neck.”

  The man’s ginger head bobbed up and down in agreement. “Some people invent tricks and some people perfect them. I am sure Jim Fortunati in his heyday, though I have seen him do the triple a great many times, never did one as beautifully as you have just done. I am sure—”

  “Hey, Lefty,” someone yelled. “You got work to do, not just stand there batting the breeze with the performers! Come on, man, get with it!”

  The man crinkled his face in a smile and said, “I am neglecting some duty, I fear. A great pleasure, my boy. May it be many, many years before you inherit that cemetery lot.” He turned and hobbled slowly away.

  Tommy and Mario stared at one another. Tommy finally said, “Gruesome little creep!”

  “Dunno,” Mario said. “He knows a lot about the circus; I remember Cleo telling me that story about Parrish when Liss and I were just kids. About old Luciano Starr giving Barney Parrish a cemetery lot f
or Christmas one year. Maybe he used to be a flyer, who knows? I don’t think he’s quite all there.” He looked up at the rigging. “Quadruple somersault. No, not no how. But I suppose somebody could do a three-and-a-half, someday—”

  “You get it right out of your mind,” Tommy said angrily. “Don’t even start thinking about it!”

  Mario laughed again and shook his head. “Hell, no. Like the gimp said, there are the guys who invent tricks, and the ones who perfect them, and I’m not the one who invents them. I’ll leave the three-and-a-half to somebody else. He’s got to be nuts anyhow. Four-minute mile—it’s been proved that’s a physiological impossibility; the human heart couldn’t take it. And how in hell would you get a spaceship to the Moon, anyhow? And there’s not supposed to be any air there. I mean, even if you used one of Buck Rogers’ rocket ships, what the hell would the rocket push against? No, he’s nuts.” But again he looked up at the trapeze, as if trying to imagine a flyer somersaulting an impossible four times to a catcher, and Tommy felt himself shiver.

  I wonder if that little guy was one of those who got hurt bad trying to do the triple. They say there were lots of them. He knew a lot about flying.

  All that talk about doing the impossible. Is that really what Mario wants?

  On a long daylight run through the Northwest, Tommy sat with Papa Tony one afternoon. Mario and Angelo were playing cards with Stella in the privilege car; Johnny was doodling with a pad and pencil in the next seat. Papa Tony and Tommy were playing checkers on a pocket-size peg-board which the old man had given him for his birthday, when suddenly Tonio Santelli raised his head from studying the king he had just crowned.

  “Tommy,” he said, “you work hard, you seem happy. Are you happy?”

  Tommy felt, as always, embarrassed and confused by the solicitude. “Sure. Why shouldn’t I be happy?”

  “You boys!” Papa Tony shook his head. “You think being happy is so common like that? Sure, sure, I know you’re not miserable—you don’t have toothache, you don’t cry yourself to sleep—but happy? Happy so life is better every day, so life looks good to you?”