The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  That hadn’t been what Tommy meant, but he let it pass.

  “You all tied up with this Reddick, then?”

  “Only for the season, and that’s only got about six weeks to run. Only thing is, I’m broke. The pay here is peanuts. I had some money saved up, that season with Starr’s, but I gave it to Susan for the baby. I own a share in the house in L.A., though; maybe somebody in the family would buy me out.”

  “Well, I got some money,” Tommy said. “Not a lot, but enough to keep going a while. Something else: All the money I made with the act when I was a kid, and that year with Woods-Wayland, it’s still in a bank someplace, in trust or in escrow or something till I’m twenty-one. Only, on my twenty-first birthday I was in Germany, like I said. So all that money’s sitting there drawing interest. Joe ought to know about it, or Angelo. And after my dad got killed, Jeff Cardiff bought the cats—Angelo told me, that summer—and that money’s there, too. It’s no fortune, but it would pay for any new riggings we had to have made. You’d have to find us a catcher and all that stuff—you still got contacts, I don’t.”

  “Far as that goes,” Mario said, “there’s a lot of rigging around home, and I don’t think anybody in the family’s using it. We could work out over the winter at the house—”

  “Look, would your family want me there?”

  Mario’s face tightened. “They better. Like I said, I own a hunk of the place. The place used to belong to Papa Tony, Joe, and Angelo on even shares; Papa left me his share.” Then he laughed. “Relax, kid, the family would probably swap me for you any day; they all thought the world of you. And none of them heard that old yarn about the blacklist.”

  “Want to bet? But you been married and I been in the Army—there’s a lot of water gone under the bridge. We were kids then. And now I’m a veteran, and you—you’re a married man, a father, for God’s sake! I don’t think we have to worry any about that old talk, do we?”

  Mario was slowly catching fire to the spark. “I’m rusty as hell—I’ve let myself slip—but a winter of good hard work ought to put us back in shape. We could advertise for a catcher in Billboard. Do you think we could get a copy here in town?”

  “Hick town like this? I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “Tomorrow, then. Or when we play San Antonio. Anyhow, let’s figure it out, how much cash we’ll need for riggings. We’d need a new net and new wires, even if there was stuff around the house we could use. Papa Tony used to order the nets from some place down in San Diego—they make nets for the fishing fleet. I don’t know if they’re still in business.”

  Tommy chuckled. “I used to wonder about that. I never did know where you’d buy a flying net.”

  “Well, it’s for damn sure you don’t walk into Abercrombie and Fitch’s toy department,” Mario said with a wry grin.

  Tommy pulled a ballpoint pen out of his pocket. “You got something I can figure on? In my suitcase I got a copy of that old contract, and the bankbook from that trust account or whatever it was.”

  “Sure. And while you do that, let me make some more coffee.”

  The night slipped by while-they were talking and figuring. Mario stretched at last, reaching for the long-empty coffeepot, and stared at the small clock on the table. “Good God, kid, it’s after three.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Tommy said, crumpling a page of figures, “you should have thrown me out hours ago! We can settle all the details tomorrow.”

  “I figured you’d stay here. Guess you’ll have to, unless you want to sleep in the car. Even the tourist places would all be full by now.”

  Tommy looked at Mario sharply, but he was bent over, fiddling with the shabby strap of his sandal. Hell, he told himself, you drew the line. You said to tell him his brother’s here. You’re not a kid now. Forget it. He has.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Mario sat on the edge of the bed, in a shabby old robe.

  “Cigarette?”

  “Thanks. When did you start smoking?”

  “I don’t much. Three, four a day—even Angelo wouldn’t lecture me about that.”

  “I saw his name on the—what do they call it?—screen credits on some movie. While I was in Germany.”

  “Yeah, the year I was with Starr’s he did a lot of work in Hollywood. He’s a good stuntman,” Mario said. “I always thought that was more dangerous than flying.” Mario put out his cigarette. “Long as we’re dreaming, we ought to dream about talking him into coming back, catching for us.”

  They lay side by side, not touching each other. Mario had the same faint clove smell. Tommy fought an impulse to touch the scarred shoulder. Hell, he told himself furiously, you came two thousand miles to find him, you’re friends again; leave it at that.

  How still Mario was, hardly breathing! What’s he scared of? And then he knew. Mario was—he would always be—the same. But he himself—he had gone away a boy, he had come back a man; how could Mario know whether the years had changed him?

  Why kid yourself? You were thinking about this all along. Maybe you’re crazy to try and stir up the past. You’re not the same people anymore.

  “Asleep?” he whispered.

  “Just about.” But Tommy could tell he wasn’t.

  “How old are you, Mario?”

  “Twenty-nine. You know that.”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “I hadn’t,” Mario said gently. “You were twenty-two on the first of May. I remembered that because it sounded like a good circus birthday.”

  “I forgot when your birthday is.”

  “February,” Mario said. “I’m supposed to be an Aquarius.”

  “Know what I wish?”

  “No. What?”

  “I wish to hell we’d have another thunderstorm,” Tommy said, his voice catching in his throat. He reached out and pulled Mario into his arms as if only violence could annihilate five years of constraint and misery. “Come here, Mario, you damn fool. What are you waiting for?”

  Mario let himself be pulled close, but he was tense. Tommy, sensing reluctance, resistance, felt a split-second backlash of fear. You damn idiot, have you ruined everything? Then he knew it was not reluctance; it was the old, terrible, tense control . . . . He heard Mario’s breath go out in a long convulsive sigh.

  “I was wondering—which of us—would give in first. Same old bastard, aren’t I, kid?”

  Tommy muttered, “You want me to tell you what you are?”

  “No. Once was enough, kid.” He caught him close with hungry violence. “Oh, God, I thought—”

  “Forget it. Don’t talk now. That’s all over. Come on.”

  But five years were not wiped away as readily as that, and later Tommy, watching Mario go away from him into the depths of sleep, wondered if they would ever find their way back to each other. Or had they lost forever something he now knew to have been very rare, something very perfect and precious, something they had never known how to value till they threw it away?

  CHAPTER 3

  He woke and for a minute time was annihilated; he only knew that Mario was beside him. Then he saw the shabby trailer in the morning sun and remembered where he was.

  He felt scared at the intensity of his happiness. Mario opened his eyes and smiled at him.

  “So I didn’t dream it. Hello, Lucky.”

  He laughed, and Tommy asked, “What’s so funny?”

  “You. Grown up.” Mario put a shy arm around him. They were both a little embarrassed in the bright sunlight. “Miss me?”

  Tommy touched his cheek lightly, noticing that some of the tight lines around the mouth seemed to have vanished overnight. “Sure. Come on, you better get up and do your checking.”

  “This isn’t the Flying and Reform School, kiddo. Paul and I go over the rigs before the show—that’s all the checking that gets done.”

  “No workout, either?”

  Mario grimaced. “Does the act look like it? Paul and Ina think they did all their practicing at the beginning of the season.”


  “And you hold still for that?”

  “Got no choice. It’s not my act and I’m not the boss.” Mario threw a robe over his shoulders and yawned. “The rig man jumped the show six weeks ago, so Paul and I have been setting our rigs and the slack-wire rig and the balance stages ever since. Hey, I got an idea—why not ask Blanding to put you on the payroll as a rig man? Papa Tony made you set rigs along with Buck for two years. I’d rather be doing that than what I was doing before the rig man lit out—everybody with this show has to wet-nurse the damn horses. The pay isn’t much, but—well, we might get some time to work out now and then, unless you’re in a rush to get back to the Coast.”

  Tommy shrugged. “Why not? I said I was going to keep an eye on you from now on—I might as well start right away.”

  Mario had his back turned, filling the coffeepot. He said, not looking around, “Don’t rub it in, Lucky. I know I’ve slipped. I thought I was all through worrying about the past, or the future. Now I’ve started being ashamed of myself. Maybe that’s a good sign.”

  Bob Blanding was a fat little man with a ready laugh, who admitted candidly that he knew nothing about his regular circus acts. He had spent most of his life managing a rodeo, and had only this year been persuaded to bill the show as a circus, engaging acrobats and a flying act when he could not secure a full complement of riding acts.

  “You want me to put your brother on as a rig man? How come we need one? I thought you and Reddick were doing okay.”

  Mario drew a deep breath, and Tommy thought he would explode. Instead he stuck his head out the trailer door and yelled, “Pass the word for Paul Reddick!”

  Soon the heavy little catcher, dressed in Army fatigues, stepped inside. “Tell the boss we ought to put my brother on as a rig man, Paul,” Mario said. “I swear when I get mad, and Blanding doesn’t speak Italian.”

  Paul Reddick grinned affectionately at Mario. “Bob, you promised Matt and I wouldn’t have to set our own rigs for more than a week, and here, when Matt ropes and ties an experienced man for you, you hold back in the harness!”

  “Okay, okay,” Blanding said, turning to Tommy. “Can you do anything else on the side? Can you ride? We can use another man in the riding act.”

  Tommy admitted he could not ride. “But I grew up with a circus. I can do tumbling, aerial web, fixed traps, and flying.”

  Blanding looked shrewdly at Tommy. “Why do you want this job? You look smart enough to get a better one.”

  Tommy looked Blanding right in the eye, realizing that this was one of the times when a lie was essentially more accurate than the truth.

  “I just got out of the Army, and I haven’t seen much of my brother for five years.”

  “Okay. Thirty is what I paid the other man. I’ll give you twenty-five till I know what you’re worth. And I want to see your discharge papers; I don’t hire anyone who’s AWOL.”

  Tommy went back to Mario’s trailer for the papers in his suitcase. He turned over the certificate of honorable discharge to Blanding, who looked up sharply.

  “Zane? Thought you were his brother.”

  “Stepbrother,” Mario said. “But we keep forgetting; we’ve been together since the kid was thirteen or so.”

  “Okay. Sergeant, huh? What did you do in the Army?”

  “Physical training. Some drill.”

  “That a fact? I was in for a while. Got a Purple Heart on Leyte,” Blanding said. He shoved a contract form at Tommy. “You’re hired. No drinking on the lot, no grifting, no shortchanging. This is a clean show.”

  Tommy found his time relatively full with attending to all the riggings on the show. He and Mario soon fell into their old routine of going out for practice before the day’s work started, and for Tommy, at least, it started early.

  The first two weeks were almost homecoming, with the curious difference that they were alone, isolated without their families, or anyone to interfere. Once, setting a rig in a small town in north Texas, Tommy realized that this was perilously like one of his teenage daydreams: he and Mario traveling together with some show where they could work together as much as they wanted . . . .

  He had not been on a flying rig for five years, but he found that he quickly recovered the old knack, the old timing. It was simply a question of muscles grown rusty from disuse, hardening again. When they practiced together, Mario was catching, as he had done when they first learned to work together. After a few weeks of practice, Tommy had developed enough confidence that when Mario called to him, “Still think you can do a back double?” he did not hesitate. But as he landed in Mario’s hands and swung, he realized that Paul Reddick was standing at the foot of the rigging, watching him.

  When they came down, Mario grinned at Reddick. “Told you the kid was a flyer.”

  “Seem you’re a catcher, too.”

  “Yeah, when we started out I was the catcher because I was the biggest. I taught Tommy to fly—been catching him ever since he was tall enough to reach the fly bar.”

  Tommy laughed, exhilarated with the exercise and the feeling of success. “You ought to see us do a midair pass.”

  Reddick’s eyebrows went up. “Want to try? I reckon I can still catch for one.”

  “That wasn’t exactly—” Mario scowled at him, and Tommy shut up.

  Paul Reddick started to climb the rope as Mario and Tommy went to their end of the rigging. “What the hell is the big idea?” Mario said.

  “I don’t understand. Just thought I’d like to try.”

  “Well, you’ll sure try it now. And you better not bitch it up, either.”

  “So, okay,” Reddick said, when they were all on the ground again, “hot stuff. So what are you, Jim Fortunati’s illegitimate son or something?”

  Tommy felt as if Reddick had slapped him, but he said nothing, by long habit. He returned to the trailer and dressed hastily, then went off to his work. Later he saw Mario and Reddick, near the foot of the flying rig, still deep in talk, but as he watched they laughed and walked off arm in arm. He did not see Mario again until after the matinee. When the crowd thinned and Tommy got back to the trailer, he found Mario there, wearing a robe over his tights. He was smoking a cigarette—always a storm signal—and his greeting was equally ominous.

  “You sure fouled me up with Reddick. I thought I told you how touchy he was.”

  Tommy shrugged. “He’s jealous. A blind man could see you can fly rings around his wife, or whatever she is, and now he knows you can catch well enough to make him feel like a fool. I don’t know how you dare work with him. I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, nobody’s asking you to. And unless you can knock off showing off for him, we better skip the whole thing until we have our own act again.”

  Tommy pondered a sharp answer, then thought better of it.

  “You’re the boss, Mario.”

  “No, Reddick is, and don’t you forget it, kid.”

  Tommy slammed out of the trailer. It made him feel sick, with an indefinable sickness, to see Mario knuckling under to that incompetent oaf. For the next two days they were silent, and Tommy made a point of being busy somewhere on the lot whenever Mario might normally have sought his company. He realized how tenuous their new arrangement was, how quickly it could be torn apart by a minor rift.

  But late the third evening, in the rush of the teardown, striking the rigs in a sudden squall with the help of a particularly stupid work hand, Tommy suddenly looked up and saw Mario, in his old black sweater. He worked alongside Tommy without speaking, stowing the ropes and guys in precise, almost mechanical fashion, like a careful dance in which they manipulated wires and bars and steel wires in preordained motion. Neither spoke, but when they finally hitched the trailer and climbed into their separate cars for the long haul to the next town, they were grinning at each other in the old way. Tommy knew they wouldn’t get to bed until two or three in the morning, but that didn’t matter now.

  The next morning, setting concession stands, Tommy was surprised to see
Mario at the top of the flying rig with the slender, dark-haired teenager he had found in Mario’s trailer that first day, Jack Chandler. He saw Mario give the boy the bar. Jack made a clumsy swing outward, then lost momentum in midswing. After a few ragged swings the trapeze came to rest in the center, Jack hanging from it.

  “It’s okay,” Mario called, “just let go and drop.”

  Tommy stopped to watch. So Jack was getting the rough first lesson, calculated to discourage a beginner who thought it might be easy and fun. Tommy watched with the detached amusement of the natural athlete who had never gone into a “freeze” on the trapeze.

  “Come on, it’s all right, I tell you! You know how to do it, just let go!”

  “I can’t—” The kid’s face was stiff, screwed tight; he was not far from hysteria.

  “Come on! You’ve seen me do it a hundred times! Relax, now, take it easy, just let go and roll over. You’re not going to get hurt!”

  It wasn’t just stubbornness; there was nothing willful about it. It was simply a case where the muscles obeyed the blind, instinctive fear of falling, rather than the reasoning mind which told them they wouldn’t get hurt. No matter how the victim might want to let go, he couldn’t. There was nothing funny about it, though it looked ridiculous. Santelli custom had always been to shout taunts, insults, and rude jokes until the victim was shamed or exhausted enough to fall. But Tommy was wary, now, about butting in. He stood and listened to Mario storm, threaten, plead, and cajole for a solid ten minutes before Jack, with an exhausted gasp, let go and dropped into the net. Mario immediately dived down beside him, put an arm around his shoulders, and began talking to him in gentle, encouraging murmurs. Tommy, too far away to hear the words, could only hear their tone, but after a while, Jack climbed up again. He swung out, and again lost momentum in midswing, but this time he let go, rolled up, and landed neatly on his back. Mario came down laughing, patted Jack on the shoulder, and went off whistling to change his clothes.

  When Tommy came to their trailer, Mario turned around and said, “You see what happened on the rig? The Chandler kid’s been pestering me to let him come up and swing, so I finally said okay.”