The Catch Trap

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Aunt Marge, Betsy said her foot was all right. I—I just can’t,” Tommy said desperately. “Honest, I’d rather lie right down here and die than put on that dress and wig and go out in front of all those kids who know me from my school!”

  “Now, you listen here, Tommy Zane—” Margot began, but Betsy interrupted.

  “Aw, let the boy be, Margot. I heard about it. A couple of children from his school, this afternoon, tormenting him and trying to beat him up. Children, they can be cruel—how well I know! My foot will be holding up well enough—”

  “Oh, Betsy, could you? Just here in this town—”

  “Betsy, you know very well what the doctor said,” Margot interrupted, turning on Tommy angrily. “‘Tommy, I’m ashamed of you! You have no right—”

  “Margot, he’s a boy,” Betsy said. “Don’t I know, and my own boy just like him at that age? And now out in the Pacific fighting the Japs. I’ll manage with the foot, Tommy. Run along, now.” Betsy braced herself against the metal door. The corners of her mouth whitened, but Tommy refused to see. She ought to know, he told himself. She ought to know about her own darned old foot! He stepped away from the lighted door.

  “Yes,” said a deeper, scornful voice, “run along, little boy!”

  Tommy felt it like a dousing of ice water. “Mario?”

  Mario was standing in the dusk near the trailer. In his town clothes he looked like a stranger, a dark, hostile, unfamiliar stranger. His black curls were slicked down with a fresh haircut; beneath the slanting brows, his eyes blazed.

  “Mario, I—”

  “Oh, I heard.” Mario cut him off with a scornful gesture. “I came to ask Margot— Well, no matter. And here I thought— Oh, hell, I wouldn’t trust you to run a cotton candy concession! Believe it or not, I thought you were pretty well ready to call yourself a performer, and here I find out you’re just a damn crybaby kid!”

  He cut off Tommy’s protest with a gesture of dismissal.

  “Go on, run along—va la, va la, ragazzo—run along, keep out of the way—some of us have work to do! Scram, run along, get lost, you!”

  Tommy didn’t try to answer. He bent his head and scuttled away. He had felt ready to cry, but now he wanted to die of shame.

  His family trailer was dark; his father would be checking the drops on the cages, his mother helping Ma Leighty with the costumes. He ought to be there now. He gulped, trying to hold back a flood of tears. Crybaby kid. They came anyway.

  Mario’s words hurt worst. Tommy had let Jeff, an outsider, make him ashamed of being what he was: an acrobat, a performer who did what he was told and didn’t think about himself, just about what he was doing. How could he expect to be a flyer, if he didn’t have the gumption to put on a wig and a few yards of gauze because it looked silly? Well, it looked a lot sillier to have an empty spot in the act, or somebody up there who didn’t know the routine!

  What made him think anyone even looked at him, anyhow? He was just another pink skirt. Now probably Margot would never let him fill in again. And as for Mario—Mario was probably through with him.

  He heard the first blare of noise from the band and the booming of Big Jim’s voice—not the words, just the sound through the loudspeaker. The noise, the sound, the music of the band, the laughter and screams of the kids in the audience. Oh, murder, he ought to be there! Had he gone completely nuts? Who was going to be riding his float? It would be the only time he’d missed in six years, not since he had the mumps when he was a little kid! Ma Leighty would be mad at him, too, now, and his mother. What had gotten into him? Ma Leighty trusted him! And when his father heard about it . . . . Dad hadn’t spanked him for a couple of years, but this time he wouldn’t blame his father for breaking his neck.

  I really fouled it up this time!

  There was a heavy banging on his trailer door.

  “Tommy! Hey, you in there?”

  Tommy fumbled for the light switch. His mouth felt dry. In the harsh light outside, Mario looked drawn and grownup. He had on the gold tights of his costume, and a heavy sweater over it. “Tommy, damn it, where you been hiding out? Little Ann’s hunting you all over the backyard! Get yourself over there—pronto, presto!”

  “Listen, you heard her tell me—”

  “No, you listen, you young rascal,” Mario said coldly. “While you sat back here feeling sorry for yourself, Betsy stepped down hard on that bad foot of hers and passed out! This time she’s probably torn a tendon. You don’t belong in the show, I grant that. If I were three inches shorter, I’d put on the damn costume myself and go up before I’d let you set foot in the ring! But you’re the right size and you know the routines, so you get yourself the hell over there where you belong, or I’ll kick you every step of the way!”

  Tommy opened his mouth to speak and Mario grabbed his shoulder and shook him. “Not one word, damn it!”

  With a sudden, desperate urgency, Tommy said, “Mario, wait—”

  Mario let him go and said, coldly, “You got about twelve minutes. What is it?” Then, changing his tone, “Hey—Tommy, what’s the matter, kid?”

  “Mario—” Tommy was struggling to keep a hold on himself. “I got to ask you something. Jeff said—Jeff said—” His throat closed as the pain of the memory caught at him. Would Mario brush it aside casually, put him off with a casual What do you care what they think?

  But Mario, hands in his sweater pocket, eyes alert, was looking straight at him. “Okay, kid, okay. What’s eating on you? Come on, you can tell me. What’s happened?”

  Tommy blurted out, “He said— He acted like there had to be something wrong with me. With any boy who’d wear a girl’s costume—act like a girl . . . .” His throat closed again. “He—he acted like I was a girl—asked me for a date—he was bein’ funny. Only it wasn’t funny . . . .” He couldn’t go on.

  Mario’s face was unreadable in the darkness. He didn’t speak at once, and Tommy, braced against instant, offhand, uncaring reassurance, tensed, then, slowly, relaxed.

  Mario said at last, almost in a whisper, “Christ, I should have known. So that’s it! I should have known—you’re about that age, it would bother you. Okay, listen, Tom. You know who Shakespeare was?”

  Tommy, startled by the non-sequitur, said slowly, “I guess I heard about him in school. He was a writer, wasn’t he? He wrote Hamlet, or something like that?”

  “Well, yes. Only, one of the things he wrote was ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ So tell me, do you feel like a girl when you wear that costume, do you want to be a girl?”

  “Christ, no!” Tommy yelled. “What do you think I am?”

  “That’s the whole point,” Mario said in the darkness beside him. “You are what you think you are. If it doesn’t make you feel like a girl inside, okay, then, it’s just a costume. If it made you feel wrong inside, like you were really a girl, then I’d say don’t wear it, put up a fight about it. But if you feel like a man inside, who the hell cares what you wear in the show? Anything a man does is manly, isn’t it? Or do you think you have to go around with your fists up, or slinging guns like Tom Mix, to make yourself feel like a man?”

  Tommy suddenly felt foolish—foolish, but relieved at the same time. He said, “You don’t think I look too much like a girl?”

  “Hell, no,” Mario responded immediately, and as they came into the lights near Margot’s trailer, his sober face cracked suddenly into a grin. “Ragazzo, there’s nothing effeminate about you. You don’t look like a girl, you don’t walk like a girl, you don’t fly like a girl—and I started flying with my sister, so I know what I’m talking about. Nobody could take you for a girl, even in that costume, except the rubes in the grandstand, and if you care what they think, you’re in the wrong business.”

  That is what his father had said, what Margot had said; but for some reason, coming from Mario, the truth hit home. Tommy let out a long, shaking sigh. He no longer felt like crying.

  “Go on,” Mario said,
“your act’s waiting for you. If you were two years older, they’d soak you with a fine for missing spec. You want to be treated like a trouper, Tom, you better start acting like one. Go on—better run.”

  He ran, not looking back. Margot’s trailer was confusion, filled with girls and fluttering skirts, powder, gauze. Tommy stepped in, hesitantly.

  “Tommy, thank goodness!” Margot seemed not to remember that he had been there before. She thrust an armful of pink tarlatan at him. “You haven’t got time to go back to your trailer and change, just step back in the kitchen.”

  He went meekly, shucking his clothes in the cramped space between stove and icebox, pulling on the ruffled costume. He came out tying the slippers. The girls had all vanished in a flutter of pink. Betsy Gentry was lying in Little Ann’s bunk bed, a faded kimono wrapped around her. She looked very small. Her ankle was resting on a burlap bag filled with ice from the snow cone stand, dripping on a piece of oilcloth.

  Tommy stopped beside her.

  “Betsy, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because she’s a performer with a show to do,” Margot said brusquely. “Hurry up, Tommy. Your face is a mess.” She flung a wet washrag at him, and Tommy, realizing his face was smeared with tears and dirt, submitted meekly to the indignity of letting Margot scrub his face.

  As he was hurrying toward the entrance (he saw with relief that he was not late, that the group of pink-clad girls and women were still waiting there), he remembered again that his school friends would see him performing as a girl. But it didn’t seem to matter now.

  Why should he care what they thought? He was an acrobat, doing what he’d been trained to do, and what the show required. Maybe, behaving like a crybaby kid, he’d lost Mario’s special friendship and interest. But he could get back his own respect.

  The band had gone into the opening bars of the “Pink Lady Waltz”; he heard Zelda, beside him, whispering the counts under her breath. Then he was on the rope, climbing, and the faces in the stands were blurred out by the lights. The world out there was real, more real than he had ever been able to believe—but it would never have any power over him again.

  CHAPTER 3

  During the intermission, while the pitchmen were selling peanuts, cotton candy, and toy monkeys on strings, Tommy sat in his gym shorts and sweater, watching the acts form up for the second half of the program. He had seen a couple of faces he knew in the audience. No one had been laughing, and one boy who had been in his grade last year had given him a friendly wave. Maybe Jeff and Nancy had only wanted to take him down a peg or two for bragging. What difference did it make?

  None, in him. And yet he realized, without knowing just why, that somehow something very important had happened to him, that he had surmounted some crucial crisis without even knowing for certain just what it was.

  Shuffles Small, the wirewalker, was standing in the entrance in his silver and white costume, getting ready to go on; he opened the second half of the show. “Are you still here?” he said to Tommy. “Tonio Santelli was looking for you a few minutes ago—you’re supposed to be over at their trailer. You got a lot to learn about timing a show, kid. Better get along over there as fast as you can.”

  Tommy went in the direction indicated. Already there were large bare gaps appearing in the backyard; workhands and rigging men were striking the riggings and apparatus from the first half of the show. The aerial ballet riggings, the poles and circles and webs, had come down and were being loaded into one of the trucks; the cage truck with the lions had already pulled out. Tommy reached the rigging truck with the FLYING SANTELLIS on the side, and saw Papa Tony scowling at him from the doorway.

  “What’s the matter with you? You forgot? This of all things you forgot, that Lambeth said we start you in San Angelo?”

  “No, but I thought—Mario said—”

  “Mario does not yet do the thinking for this act, young man. Lambeth says we start you out in San Angelo—very well, we start you out in San Angelo. Anyway, we have the duo rigging up; it was put up this morning. You come out with us, stand on the platform. Then we open with the duo routines, so we can get the second rigging up, out of our way. After that, you can handle the ropes, nothing more this time.”

  “Honest?” Tommy hardly dared to believe it.

  “You think I talk for the pleasure of hearing myself? But not in your shorts! Go inside and they will find you some tights,” Papa Tony ordered and then walked off.

  Inside the trailer Mario and Angelo were standing in front of the board they used for a dressing table. Mario was shaking out the green and gold capes they wore into the ring. Angelo nodded curtly at Tommy. “About time you got here! Next time, get over here during intermission, remember? Here, get into these.” He felt out a pair of faded green tights. “They’re mine, but I guess they’ll fit. Just tie the tapes good and tight—you don’t want them falling down around your fanny in the ring. You really would look like a damn fool then.”

  “Fine time to start talking about people making damn fools of themselves. In case you meant me.” Mario was in a foul mood.

  Angelo handed Tommy a green singlet top with a gold stripe down the front, like the one he was wearing. “Calm down, Matt, your temperament is showing. I mean it, kid, you sit down and have a cigarette or do some deep-breathing exercises or something. You walk out there looking like that, and Papa won’t let you try it, I’m telling you. No, I’m warning you!”

  Mario muttered something savage in Italian. Angelo came over to Tommy, who was nervously smoothing up the scratchy wool tights. Angelo showed him how to fasten the tapes and tuck the ends inside. Then he wound a fold of gauze around Tommy’s wrists so the adhesive would not burn his skin and strapped adhesive tape over it. “That too tight? Tell me now if it is, and I’ll fix it.”

  “No, it’s okay.”

  Angelo had never paid so much attention to Tommy before. Under ordinary conditions Tommy was a little afraid of him, but right now he was too shaky to think about it. He had never been allowed to hang around when the Santellis were actually getting ready for a performance. There was none of the laughter and good-natured horseplay of rehearsal; they were quiet, and tense, and deadly serious.

  “Your hair’s got sand in it. Here.” Angelo handed him a comb. It was not any too clean, but Tommy used it without comment.

  Mario was still standing in front of the mirror, settling the green-and-gold cape over his shoulders. He turned around. As always in the bright stage costume, he looked larger, his face dark, the slanted eyebrows giving his features a faintly satanic look. He said shortly, “When we go in the ring, you walk between Angelo and Papa Tony. You’ve seen the prop man taking our capes?” Tommy nodded. “You do that tonight; it will give the audience a good look at you. Papa Tony’s first, then Angelo’s, then mine, then give them to the rigging man—you know the bit. Just don’t rush it.”

  Angelo looped his cape at his throat. Tommy had none; he was just a spare part, an extra man. They walked across the backyard toward the entrance, arriving just as the band crashed into the slow, impressive music that heralded the entrance of the flyers. For the hundredth time, Tommy resolved to ask one of them what it was, and realized he would probably forget again.

  “Come on.” Angelo took his elbow and steered him toward the entrance. Mario still hadn’t spoken. Tommy knew that some performers were more nervous than others before they went into the ring—he himself felt as if he’d be lucky to get as far as the foot of the flying rig without being sick—but Mario looked as if he were walking in his sleep. Angelo gave Tommy a quick, tight grin, then said in a whisper, “Okay, kid, take it easy, you’ve done it a hundred times, no reason this time should be any different.” He reached past Tommy and grabbed Mario’s elbow.

  “You’re guyed-out, Matt, tight as a tent. You still feeling lucky? I don’t mind, if you don’t.”

  Mario said something, but Tommy didn’t hear what it was, for the voice of Jim Lambeth was booming over the speakers.
>
  “The Flying Santellis . . .”

  Tommy took a deep breath. He felt wobbly, as if his legs were not quite long enough to touch the ground. He tried to walk the way they did, in measured slow steps, looking neither left nor right. As the solemn entrance music changed without a transition into a graceful, swaying waltz, Tommy reached right and left, taking the heavy capes and passing them to the rigging man. He was last on the ladder and the lights were shining in his eyes. As he stepped on the platform it felt oddly like the first time; his feet were not quite steady. Then he found his balance as he took hold of the side rope. Mario’s hand was hard and steady on his shoulder.

  He was cold, inside and out. The floodlights made the trapeze bars look oddly different, thin strange dark lines, and Angelo, and Papa Tony on the second catcher’s trapeze for this opening trick, looked strange, larger than usual. He only half heard what Big Jim was saying:

  “Appearing for the first time anywhere . . . youngest trapeze flyer regularly appearing with any circus in America . . . first time the Santellis are joined by a new member of their troupe . . . Mario and Tommy Santelli on the duo rigging.”

  As they pulled down the bar, Mario whispered, “You can see all right with the lights?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right—now!’”

  The inside count clicked off without any need for conscious thought. One: four hands slapping on the bar with a single sound. Two: the long outward swoop, the high, flexed kick and return. Three: the backswing for momentum—and in a flash under the unfamiliar lights, Tommy saw the thin dark line of the net below. Four: the launching sweep into space, the slapping of Papa Tony’s hands around his wrists, the sudden weight on his shoulders . . . knowing, not seeing, Mario smacking into Angelo’s grip, the identical curve and flex of their bodies as they swung together, practiced until it was reflex, automatic. The backswing, the shift to face the platform, the swing boosted across empty space, the split-second numbing terror of which he was never quite free at this point—if the trapeze had blown sidewise, even a little, in the wind—the heart-stopping relief of feeling it safe and squarely caught in their four hands, balanced, no ragged catch to make it slip to one side or the other. Palms gripping. Long roll of drums, or was it his heart pounding? His feet jolted on the platform and he heard the applause, his first, rolling up, surging, like the pounding of blood in his head. Strangely, he felt no exhilaration, no pride, only a curious, drained relaxation. Exhilaration would come later.