Mario’s mouth twisted. “And you’re willing to expose your son to my supposed depravity?”
Lionel started to laugh, but it didn’t come out that way.
“Don’t be like that, Matt. You’re decent—nobody Tony raised could be anything else. But if you’re fond of the kid, if you care what happens to him, you owe it to him to split up, give him a chance to get clear of the blacklist, too.”
“You’re assuming everybody would treat the story the way Woody did.”
“A lot would, Matt. Starr’s would, but I could talk Randy into taking a chance on you. And if you ditch the kid now, everybody will just assume Wayland is a liar with a mind as dirty as his mouth.”
Mario looked at Lionel, and for a moment his face was completely naked. “I—I promised the kid I’d stand by him. He trusts me.”
Lionel sounded as troubled as his young cousin. “Be reasonable, Matt. I couldn’t sign the kid anyway; Starr’s policy is real tight: nobody under twenty-one in an aerial act. If the kid cares a damn what happens to you, he won’t want to hold you back. Matt, go home, talk to the boy, try and make him understand you’re doing what’s best for both of you. I want you with me, I need a steady partner; I can’t stand to see you wreck your life this way. And for Uncle Tony’s sake, I want to see the Santelli name come out of this without too much mud sticking to it.”
Mario sat perfectly still for several minutes. Behind the impassive face he maintained, he could hear another voice, forever silenced now: Promise me something, Matty. Promise me not to get drunk again, not to get in trouble, because this hurts all of us, all the family. He had not been drunk, this time, but he might as well have been. He had brought all this on himself, driven by some lashing agony beyond his own comprehension; he had flung away all their careful structure of caution.
“Think it over, Matt,” Lionel urged. He was watching the younger man with something painfully akin to pity. “Talk it over with the kid. Call me in a day or two. But don’t wait too long. Randy wants to have all the acts signed by April first, and we ought to work together a while if you’re going to put the triple in the act this year.”
But Mario was seeing something else. Tommy, humiliated, his face in the dirt of the dressing tent, whispering the filthy word that betrayed everything that had been between them. Violated. Worse than whatever anyone might have said about seducing him in the first place.
And I could do that to him!
“Wait,” he said, suddenly, raising his head to Lionel, “I don’t need to think it over at all.”
CHAPTER 2
The stairs of the rooming house were dark and cluttered. Tommy fumbled for his key, shoved a garbage bag aside with his foot, then rapped on the door.
“It’s not locked,” Mario called from inside. “Come in.”
Inside it was tidy and bare, coffee cups still cluttered on the table from the late breakfast. Outside the day was fading, but Mario had not turned on the light.
“You got back early,” Tommy said, pulling the string on the light fixture. “I didn’t expect you till late tonight, but I saw the car outside.”
“Did you call the house this morning?”
“Talked to Lucia. Sure, I told her you drove down to winter quarters to talk to Lionel about a job this spring—that was okay, wasn’t it? She wanted us to come out to the house for dinner, and I said I’d have to see if you had anything set up.” He hung his jacket in the narrow closet. “I ran into Keno in the coffee shop. He gave me a ride home.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Nothing much. Asked why you hadn’t been around. All the usual stuff. Oh, he talked a lot, but he didn’t say anything, you know what I mean.”
“Why didn’t he come in, say hello?”
“I wasn’t sure you were home,” Tommy said, “and he and I got nothing to say to each other.”
“You don’t like Eddie, do you?”
“He’s okay. I like him better than most of that crew of phonies hanging around the place,” Tommy said. “At least he doesn’t try to make me.”
“You get your sneakers?”
“Uh huh. Paid three-fifty for them—that okay?”
“Sure, if they fit you okay. You get black or blue ones?”
“Black.” Tommy stuck his foot out. “Same size as the last two pairs I got. I guess I’ve really quit growing.”
“Good thing, too; you’re tall enough for a flyer,” Mario said. “Listen, that crowd down there really been giving you trouble, Tommy?”
“Hell, no, I can handle myself.”
“I told you what you’d get into if you hung around with me.”
Tommy swung around and said, “I can take care of myself. Anyhow, they know when I say no thanks, I mean no thanks. But your friends don’t like me much and I don’t like them much, and I think the smartest thing you ever did was lay off running all over town with that crew of—of—”
“Why are you so afraid of the word, Tommy?”
Tommy said harshly, “Okay, queers, if you want me to say it. If you get some kind of kick out of hearing me say it.”
“I just don’t want you kidding yourself. If you don’t mind being”—he used the word again, deliberately—“queer, then I don’t want you kidding either of us by being scared to say it. Or admit it.”
Tommy stood with his hands on his hips, belligerent. “Okay, okay, dammit, I’m queer. But I don’t have any more in common with those bastards than you do.”
“I’ve got more than you think, Tommy.”
“Well, I don’t. Except,” he added scrupulously, “that we all happen to be queer. And I’m not making a career of it the way they are.”
“You’re pretty intolerant, aren’t you, kid?”
“Yeah, people who live in glass houses shouldn’t go around heaving rocks and all that stuff. Sure, I’m queer, but that’s my private life and I don’t go around shoving it in everybody’s face, either.”
Mario swung his legs to the floor and sat up. “Maybe they can’t help being what they are, any more than we can help being what we are.”
“You’d think they could try,” Tommy said, with the intolerance of the very young. “And I get sick of watching them make passes at every new boy comes around, too.”
Mario laughed and put an arm around him. “Your own fault, kid. You shouldn’t be so damn good-looking. Sexy freckles and all that.”
Tommy chuckled. “Lay off the crap, okay? Tell me how it went with Lionel.” Then, as the laughter slid off Mario’s face, he said quickly, “Bad, huh?”
Mario sat down on the edge of the bed. “I’ve been putting it off. Come and sit here by me, Lucky.” After a minute Mario said, “Here’s the thing, kid. Lionel made me an offer—a damn good one. But he won’t take us as a team.”
“Jesus, that again?” He was, of course, expecting Mario to repeat what he had said last year: that they went as a team, a family, the Flying Santellis, or not at all.
But Mario was silent for a long time, and then said, “Look, Tom, I could string you along, tell you it’s because Starr’s has this policy about nobody under twenty-one in the air. But it’s more than that.”
“Hell, Starr’s isn’t the only show on the road!”
Mario filled his lungs with air, then let it out again in a long breath. “They just might be, at that, as far as we’re concerned. Tom, I found out why Sorenson dropped us after just one week, and why we couldn’t even get in to see Clint Redmann, and why Braden told us he didn’t have any spots and then signed the Russos the next week. Kid—” He hesitated again, not knowing how to say it, knowing it was his fault and not Tommy’s at all, sick with the enormous weight of guilt. “Kid, did you know we’re blacklisted?”
“Blacklisted? What for?”
“Use your head.” Mario’s voice was harsh. “Coe Wayland talked.”
“Oh, murder,” Tommy said in a whisper. “Mur-der.”
“Yeah, murder. And—listen, Tom—” Mario took his hand, and hel
d it, hard. “Suicide, as long as we stick together. Lionel laid it on the line for me. He’ll try to fight the blacklist for me, and at your age, nobody’s going to give a damn. I wanted to tell Lionel to go piss up a rope. But if that’s how things stand, we’re washed up, and you know it—washed up as a team. We just might get by, in a family act. But there’s no family act anymore. Lionel’s sticking his neck way, way out for me. I’m going to have to take second billing as it is—Fortunati and Santelli, maybe even Flying Fortunatis—for a year or two, if Starr is still itchy about the blacklist. There’s no way we can fight it, kid. No way. Not together.”
Tommy shut his eyes for a moment. He looked younger than he was, vulnerable, and, to Mario, painfully like the child he had first known. Then he got up off the bed, pulling his hand away from Mario’s, and stood at the window, looking down at the crumbling houses across the street. Mario went after him, but Tommy threw off his hand.
“You an’ your big talk! About how we’d stick together no matter what!”
“I didn’t know about the blacklist then, Lucky.”
“You want to get rid of me, why the hell didn’t you say so? Why give me the big con job? Just come right out and say you got yourself another boy!”
“For God’s sake,” Mario said. “You don’t think Lionel—”
Tommy swallowed. “Might be a relief for you at that,” he said. “Play it nice and safe. Get yourself a partner you don’t have to worry about!”
Mario shut his eyes. “That’s a hell of a long way below the belt, kid.”
“You think what you just said wasn’t?”
“Oh, Christ,” Mario said, and sagged on the bed again. “You think I don’t know how you feel? You think I don’t realize—kid, I know you could have saved yourself with Woods-Wayland, real easy. All you had to do was go to Coe Wayland and tell the boss you didn’t have the faintest notion what I was trying to do with you, and you’d have been lily-white and I’d have been up to my neck in mud. You could even have had me put in jail.”
“What the hell do you think I am?”
“You’re my kid,” said Mario, trying to smile at him.
“And a lot of good it did me!” Tommy flung at him. “But when I thought we could stick together, I—I didn’t care. Only now—” That was all he could say. “All you can talk about is the goddamn blacklist—”
Mario’s voice suddenly went hard. “Damn it, Tom, let’s stop playing games. There’s just one way we can beat this thing. But if you want to rub it in that you lost your job by sticking by me, and now I’ve got to turn around and stick by you—”
“Look—Mario—I didn’t say—”
“You shut up,” Mario said roughly. “I’m telling you what chance we’ve got to beat this thing. I can go with Lionel, and we find you something else. The other—no, damn it, you listen; you had your say and now it’s my turn—I’ll do it if you say so. We change our names, walk out on the family, and hide out in some dirty little mud show down South, the kind that’ll hire any lamster they can get, playing to hear the band and driving trucks and taking tickets on the midway between shows. Maybe you think you could take that, after flying in center ring with the Santellis, but I don’t. But I’ll do it if you rub it in that I have to stick with you. Because that’s the only goddamn way we can stick together.”
Tommy put his head down on his folded arms and leaned against the cold glass of the window while Mario went on behind him, his voice harsh with pain: “If we stick together, we’ll end up by quitting flying for good, because the only places that can ignore the blacklist and hire us as a team will be shows too small to carry a flying act. Lionel’s got a big enough name to fight the blacklist, and he’s doing it—not for me, just because it’s his family, too. And—I don’t know about you, kid—I want to fly.”
He reached a hand toward the boy, but at the look on Tommy’s face he dropped it again. When Tommy finally spoke, his voice was dull and toneless.
“Okay, Mario. I see what you mean. There’s nothing else you can do.”
“I feel like I’m knifing you in the back, kid. But, honest to God, I don’t see what else we can do. And it won’t be long. One, two seasons—just till the talk dies down. Now, doesn’t it make sense?”
“Sure,” Tommy said, still in that dead voice, “makes a lot of sense.”
“I’ll see that you don’t lose anything by it. They’re paying me as much as the whole team got with Woods-Wayland—”
“If you offer me money, Mario, I’ll kill you,” Tommy said without raising his voice.
“It’s always been share and share alike with the Santellis, as far as I’m concerned.”
“But I’m no Santelli. Johnny warned me a long time ago that I shouldn’t forget that. Anyhow, you just got through saying the Santellis are all washed up. Okay, tell Lionel he’s got himself a boy.”
He went to the closet and dragged out his battered suitcase. While Mario watched, stunned, he began folding his clothes into it. Mario finally demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Packing. In case it’s any of your business. Which it ain’t, anymore.”
“Have you gone crazy?” Mario grabbed and shook him. “Are you walking out on me?”
“That’s a good one,” Tommy said with a bitter grin. “Listen, take your hands off me. I mean it. Let’s not end this up with a big fight.”
“Fight?”
“I mean, like a couple of loose teeth.” Tommy knocked him away. “I mean it, damn it, take your hands off me. Unless”—his mouth twisted—“unless it would give you some kind of kick to break my arm or put my shoulder out of joint as a kind of good-bye present.”
Mario let him go and collapsed on the bed. “I guess I deserve all that. But will you tell me what else you think I could’ve done?”
“Not a damn thing.” Tommy jerked open a drawer and started to sort out a tangle of tights. “I don’t know which of these are mine—I’ll just take the first two pairs I can get untangled, okay?”
“Take anything you want, Lucky. But you don’t have to walk out like this. Can’t we talk?”
“What’s to talk about? You said how it had to be.”
“Look, I’ll ask Lionel to find you something—”
“Don’t do my any favors.”
“Maybe it would be a good idea for you to go home for a while. Lucia never did like you to stay out here with me. Angelo knows everybody in the business—”
“Will you cut out that crap? Home? Who are you kidding?”
“It is your home, Lucky. You know that as well as I do. Angelo thinks the world of you. He’ll break his neck to get you a good spot for the season. Just ask him.”
“And have him gloating because we split up? Fat chance!” Tommy slammed the drawer shut, threw a pair of sneakers in the top of the suitcase, and began to fasten it.
“Lucky—” Mario begged, “look at me. Won’t you sit down and listen to me, have a drink, just talk about it?”
“For Christ’s sake!” Tommy yelled, and to Mario it sounded like a shriek, like the shriek when Mario had slammed the door on his hand. “How much more of this do you think I can take?”
Mario fell back on the bed and put his face in his hands. He said between them, “Someday you’ll thank me for this, Tom.”
“Anyway, you’d like to think so.” Tommy snapped the suitcase lock shut and shoved his arms into his denim jacket. He gave the room a single cold, clinical glance. “Well—see you around, I guess, sometime.”
“Tom—you’re not going, just like that?”
“You taught me not to have much use for tender farewells.”
Mario got up and said, “Tom, promise me you’ll—”
“Hell with that!” Tommy said. “No goddamn promises. I wouldn’t keep them any better than you did.”
“You bullheaded brat!” Mario’s voice broke. “You’re doing this on purpose. I tried to explain why it had to be this way.” His voice wobbled, then broke in an
guish. “At least tell me what you’re going— Don’t make me— Dammit, Tommy, you’re still—still my kid.”
At the edge of endurance, Tommy said, “Listen, you. You told me once—you said it was for my own good—you couldn’t take my falls for me. So who’s asking you to? Let’s make it quick and clean. No slush. No postmortems. And for Christ’s sake, no kisses an’ tears!”
“Christ! You use a knife, don’t you?”
“Got to. Not big enough to break your arm.”
“You really want it this way?”
“What the hell does it matter what I want? It’s the only way I can take it.”
Mario said at last, “All right. Have it your own way.” He pulled out his wallet.
“I said don’t offer me money, Mario, or I’ll kill you.”
“I’m not going to let you walk out of here without a god-damn cent in your pocket. I got a job. You can’t even draw your back pay,” Mario said, and Tommy finally shrugged.
“You want me off your conscience, too? Do what you damn please. You will anyway.”
Mario handed him several bills, not counting them, and Tommy stuffed them into his jeans without looking at them. Hesitantly, Mario held out his hand. Tommy put down the suitcase and they clasped four hands for a moment, neither daring to speak or look at the other. Mario finally muttered, releasing Tommy from an invisible cord, “So long, Lucky.”
“Mostly bad luck, I guess.” Their hands fell apart; Tommy hoisted the suitcase and went out of the room and down the stairs.
Mario sat on the bed, his hands over his face, holding himself where he was only by the iron discipline of years. It had been all he could do to keep from grabbing the kid in the old, anguished embrace, promising—promising what? No goddamn promises. I wouldn’t keep them any better than you did.
No, it’s better this way. Let the kid go. He’ll hurt for a while, but everything you said is right, and he knows it.
He went to the window and stood there. He watched Tommy come out the house door, stand motionless for a moment, then walk away down the street without looking back.
The Catch Trap Page 52
