Tommy hunted the backyard fruitlessly for Mario. At last, when the whole lot was dark and he knew his mother would be wondering why he did not come in, he started wearily back. There were already blank spaces in the line of trailers, where a few of the acts had left as soon as the night show was done. As he was about to slip silently into the Zane trailer, he heard a low whistle and turned, to see Mario standing beneath a streetlight just outside the lot. He lifted one hand and beckoned. When Tommy reached him, Mario motioned him to silence and, taking him by one elbow, led him outside the circle of light. The highway leading past the lot was dark and silent, and a row of lights, like sparks or jewels, led away endlessly over the prairie in diminishing perspective. Tommy broke the silence at last: “Listen, Mario, my mother is going to wake up and look at the time and give me holy hell!”
Mario shrugged. “Well, it’s the last time in a couple of months you’ll have to worry about me getting you in any kind of trouble. I just figured we could say good-bye without the whole show watching, that’s all.”
The dry leaves of a cottonwood rustled over their heads, accentuating the fact that they were talking almost in whispers. “Angelo was getting on my back about being—being so rough on you, kid. Damn it, I had to, can’t you see? I had to be rough on you, Tommy. If I wasn’t—wasn’t tough that way, I’d melt down and go soft all over and you’d find me lying in a puddle someplace.” His voice cracked.
“I don’t care,” Tommy said. “You can be as rough on me as you want to, in front of people. Guess Angelo wasn’t figuring on the kind of time you were giving me behind his back.”
First hesitantly, then unmistakably, Mario laughed. In the darkness he flung his arms around Tommy and hugged him, a brief, intense hug. “No hard feelings, okay, kid?”
Tommy chuckled and said, “I’m not going to answer that.”
Mario stared, caught the meanings, and snorted. “Watch your language, you fresh egg.” Then, for Tommy was shivering in the cutting wind, “Hey, listen, I shouldn’t keep you standing around in the cold like this. Angelo’s likely to think I’ve gone off to get drunk, or something, and come looking for me; we’re supposed to be pulling out around three in the morning. We’d better say good-bye now.”
“Okay,” Tommy said tonelessly. “Goodbye.”
“Lucky, what’s the matter?”
“What do you think?” Tommy found, to his dismay, that his voice was shaking. “Maybe you can just say good-bye like this, for months, just like that, and—and not care. I can’t.”
Mario spun him roughly around. His face was shadowed against the sudden murk of clouds over the moon. “Who the hell told you I didn’t care? But—listen, kid, I know this is rough on you. I tried to figure out some way—but some things are just like a fall in the net. You don’t get used to it, and it doesn’t get any easier, but all you can do is roll with it. And I can’t take your falls for you. Sure I hate to say good-bye like this. Sure. I’ll miss you. But there are some things I can’t make any easier than they are, and it’s no use trying. Okay?”
“What the hell am I supposed to say to that?”
Mario sighed. “In some ways it’s a good thing we’re breaking up for a while,” he said. “It will give you a chance to do some good hard thinking about all this. About the kind of thing we’ve been doing, about the kind of life you want. Someday you might come to see it the way other people would see it. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Or something worse.”
“You keep harping on that,” Tommy said, and heard his voice break into soprano again. “If I’m old enough to risk my goddamn neck forty feet up in the air, I sure as hell ought to be old enough to decide who I want to sleep with!”
“Just the same. When you’re a few thousand miles away, and you can think straight, you may start hating me.”
“Don’t get off on that, Mario. It kills me when you start that.”
“Okay. Okay, kid.” Mario patted his arm. “But it won’t hurt us to be apart a while. January’s not so long.”
As if drawn by a magnet, they clasped four hands together. Tommy, still shaking, was braced and stiffened by the drawn, gaunt face above him. I can’t take your falls for you. “So long, Mario. See you in January.”
“Don’t say good-bye, kid. Just say good night.” His hands tightened on Tommy’s, but although they were close enough for an embrace, he did not kiss him, and Tommy thought, bewildered, Why not? Angelo did. “I said it once, Tommy: Tu sei mi fortuna o sventura . . . . Maybe bad luck’s better than none. Maybe you know now why I said it.” He strode away, not looking back.
Tommy turned and went blindly toward his trailer. The dull ache in him was worse than tears. He bumped blindly into some piece of furniture inside, and heard his mother call out, “That you, Tommy? It’s late—where were you?”
“Talking over the season with—with the Santellis. Forgot the time.”
“Well, get to bed—don’t wake up your dad.” Tommy undressed in the dark and went to bed, too disciplined to cry, not even aware now that that was what he wanted to do. He heard the clock ticking away the hours, and some time before dawn he heard a car start up, the creaking as a trailer lumbered away. That would be the Santelli trailer, pulling out. Then he turned over, burying his face in his crumpled pillow, and felt all the despair and violence in him, beyond tears. He did not believe it was possible to live this way; it seemed as if even dying would not turn off the blind, despairing ache inside him. And yet through it all he knew that when morning came he would get up and go silently about the ordinary business of the day, like always. It was just part of being what he was. But already time had begun to count off, for him, in the rhythm of waiting which had now become his whole being. At just past fifteen Tommy had learned one of life’s hardest lessons, lying in wait for the young and guileless: that despair, like love, leaves no visible signs, even to those who are supposed to know us best; and that despair, like love, exists in its own time, outside clocks and calendars, a ceaseless rhythm of waiting, of progression, and of pain. He felt he would not really exist again till January, when he could go home to California, to the Santellis, to Mario.
~o0o~
His father had wired the time his bus would arrive, but when Tommy got to the bus station there was no one to meet him. For a moment he wondered if the Santellis thought he was old enough, this year, to find his own way out to the house. Then, through the crowds of holiday travelers, he saw Mario, looking—as always in street clothes—dark, thin, slouched, untidy—wholly unlike himself.
“Hi, there.”
“Hello, Mario.”
“Let me take your suitcase. Good trip?”
“Fair. Kids crying all night. And a girl who wanted to flirt or maybe just wanted a shoulder to sleep on.”
A grin flickered on Mario’s face, and for the first time Tommy recognized him. “You shouldn’t be so damn attractive to girls.”
“Professional asset, my dad said.”
Mario had a new car: a used Cadillac, sleek, dark gray, only four or five years old.
“Hey—nice car!”
Mario opened the door and tossed Tommy’s suitcase inside. “Had a bit of luck this fall and put all my spare cash in it. That old Chrysler fell apart on me, and I picked this one up cheap from a guy at the ballet school.”
“Eight cylinders, or one of those twelves?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. It runs good, though, and doesn’t keep breaking down on me, and that’s all I care about. You can look under the hood sometimes if you really care. Watch your fingers,” he warned automatically before slamming the door. “Listen, Tom, I answered the phone when your father’s wire was phoned in; I just happened to be there. I told Lucia you wouldn’t be in till tomorrow, okay?”
“Why?”
Mario said, not looking at him, fussing with the gearshift, “Last year you wanted to see my place. I thought you’d like to come and stay overnight there. Look, if you don’t want to, you can call the house and tell them it was a mi
x-up—”
Tommy felt as if a crushing weight had been lifted from his chest. “Don’t be a dope.”
Mario lived in a huge, crumbling old house, cut up years ago into rooms and small apartments. His room was on the third floor, big and almost empty. The floor was bare wood and carefully polished, and a ballet barre had been fixed at one end of the room. Besides a table and a metal bed, there was no other furniture except a bookcase with a lot of thick books in it. Tommy knew Mario read a lot on the road, mostly pulp magazines, but he had never seen him with a book in his hand. He went to look at them while Mario hung his jacket in the closet, but most of them were about ballet. He picked up one with the title Athletics in the Ancient World and leafed through it. It was full of pictures that looked like something in a museum: old vases and dishes and statues, mostly of naked men running, throwing spears, jumping hurdles. He shrugged and put the book back.
“A lot of this stuff belongs to Eddie Keno,” Mario said. “He’ll be in later. Sit down somewhere, why don’t you?”
There were no chairs, so Tommy sat down on the bed.
Mario pulled out a small chenille rug from under it and sat down on the floor, kicking off his shoes as all the Santellis did indoors.
“Who’s this Keno character?”
“Someone I met at the ballet school. Winters I live here, and he lives with his folks and hangs around with a gang of science fiction fans down in the city. He keeps some stuff here and I let him use the place if he wants to bring somebody here. Summers when I’m on the road he moves in here. It works out pretty good. We don’t really see a lot of each other, but it means we get to keep the place and it’s rent-controlled. It was pretty bad during the war, right down here in the blackout zone—” He gestured at the thick heavy curtains rolled up at the top of the windows. “Sometimes we got air-raid scares, but nothing ever happened.”
“We got that, too, the year we lived in Florida. There was all that talk about submarines, but all we ever got was blackout drills. You have a good fall?”
“Pretty good. Angelo and I took a six-week booking with an indoor circus up in Seattle. We had Liss working with us.”
“Liss? But I thought—”
“It’s kind of a long story. Sorenson wanted a girl in the act, and Cleo Fortunati found us a kid called Linda Slade. But a week before we opened, she went to the net and broke her kneecap, and there wasn’t time to get anybody else. Angelo sent a frantic wire to Liss. So she took the next train, dumped Davey with Lucia, worked three days with us, and when we opened, there she was. Dave Renzo raised hell, but we had a show opening and there was nothing else to do. We had a marvelous time. There’s nobody in the world like Liss.”
Tommy felt an odd, illogical jealousy, and was ashamed of it. Did he begrudge Mario a few weeks with his beloved sister? Mario fished out a clipping from his rubbed wallet and handed it over. It was a picture of the three of them, headed FLYING SANTELLIS SMASH SUCCESS AT SORENSON SHOWS. He read aloud from the caption beneath the picture: “‘Star flyer Mario Santelli, his catcher, Angelo, and his sister, Elissa, exhibited a flying pass and other aerial maneuvers with charm, and poise.’”
“No triple?”
“After all that fuss getting Liss down to work with us, I didn’t feel like pushing for it.” Mario folded the clipping and put it away again.
Inside the closet was an assortment of clothes quite unlike any he had seen Mario wear.
“How’s the rest of the family?” Tommy asked.
“Fine, except Stel. She’s still crawling around looking like a ghost.”
“Stella? What happened to her?”
Mario hesitated; finally he said, “Okay, you’re family, you’ve got a right to know. Johnny got the kid knocked up, and instead of buying her a wedding ring he took her to a doctor. A crooked one.”
“Oh, jeez . . .”
“Liss had Johnny’s number, all right,” Mario said grimly, “and our dear respectable Grandpa Gardner!” Mario clenched his fist and struck the floor with it. “They were playing outdoor fairs and things up in Washington State when Stel got caught. Jock went to Grandpa Gardner, and he financed the deal—the reason being, he said, so Johnny wouldn’t ruin his life tying up with some little carnival tramp! Tramp!” Mario’s eyes blazed. “Girls with the show run a lot more decent than the average town girl, you take it from me! Stel didn’t knock herself up! Anyhow, the doctor was a crook, of course—decent ones don’t have to risk their licenses on that kind of dirty stuff—and afterward Jock was scared to take her to a hospital till it looked like she was dying. By the time he finally got it through his head that it was life or death, she was so far gone that the hospital had to report it to the cops, and all things considered, it was the nastiest mess of the year.”
“Sounds like a pretty rotten thing to do,” Tommy said. He wouldn’t have believed it of Johnny.
“So guess who stepped in and helped?” Mario continued.
“Papa Tony?”
“Christ, no! He’d have horsewhipped the kid, and Johnny knew it. Uncle Angelo, that’s who. He loaned them money—paid the hospital bill out of his own pocket—and then he sat down with Johnny in that hospital corridor and he put the fear of God into him. I mean that literally: He got him a priest, and they were married in the hospital. Then he brought them home, gave them his own room—you know that big corner room, the room he and Terry used to have—and never even told Lucia what a rotten heel her baby boy had turned out to be, just let them think the kids had been married all season and Stel had a fall and lost the baby. So don’t you tell, okay?”
“The poor kid,” Tommy whispered. “Is she okay now?”
“Well, sort of. I mean, she looks awful—she only weighs about eighty pounds. She had blood poisoning; they gave her some kind of new wonder drug or she wouldn’t have made it at all.”
“Johnny ought to have married her first, or let her be,” Tommy said. “I don’t care if he is your brother, it was a lousy, rotten thing to do!”
“Well, you won’t get any arguments from me on that, but I feel sort of sorry for Jock, too. Angelo told me that when it really hit him—how sick Stel was—he just sat down and bawled like a baby. And you really can’t blame him too much—I mean, the way Lu felt about having kids. I think maybe he thought he was doing Stel a favor or something, not making her have it like a good Catholic girl—”
Outside there were steps on the stairs, then somebody called, “Matt?”
“That’s Eddie now.” Mario opened the door, letting in a thickset boy in his early twenties, in tight blue jeans and a heavy red sweater. He had a full childish mouth and curly, almost kinky black hair cut close all over his head.
“So this is the famous Tommy,” he said in a sweet, high-pitched tenor, taking Tommy’s hand and holding it. “How are you, Tommy? Matt’s told me a lot about you.” He let Tommy go and said to Mario, nudging him, “Butch, but oh, so pretty! So this is what you’ve been keeping under wraps down here, Matt?”
“Cut out the comedy, Eddie. And keep off the grass—I mean it!”
“Oh, well, Tommy, we can anyway be friends, I hope,” said Eddie, and to Tommy’s furious embarrassment, he batted his curly eyelashes at him, took his hand again, and gave it an enthusiastic little squeeze. Tommy stared in amazement and pulled his hand loose. Keno had the sort of exuberance Tommy associated with drunks, yet he appeared cold sober.
“Going to bring him around to meet the boys, Matt?”
“I very much doubt it,” Mario replied.
“How old are you, anyway, Tommy?” Keno asked.
“Sixteen,” Tommy said, anticipating by a few months.
Keno whistled, saying “Jailbait, and how! I didn’t know you went for San Quentin chicken, Matt!”
“Look, damn it—”
“Anyhow, it gives you a good excuse for not bringing him around the bars. Man, would he be pickings for the first big cruising—”
“Knock it off, Eddie. I don’t run with that gang mys
elf much when I’m working.”
“You shouldn’t allow your family to absorb you like that,” Eddie said seriously. “It’s very bad for your psyche and your personality. My analyst told me—”
“Oh, screw your analyst!”
Keno murmured, “He really isn’t my type, darling.”
“Anyhow, you let me worry about my own psyche and my own personality, okay, kid? I like my work and I love my family.”
“But do they like you? Or do they like the good-boy part you play for them?”
Mario said, with an irritable shrug, “Come on, knock it off, Eddie, I mean it. I’ve got no time for all that analytical crap. Do you tell your mother and your grandmother all that stuff?”
Keno crumpled his face disparagingly. He leaned over Tommy and said in a confidential tone, “Maybe you can get rid of a few of old Matt’s inhibitions. You look like you’ve got what it takes. And if he doesn’t appreciate it—” He put an insinuating arm around Tommy’s shoulder.
Mario said, “Come off it, Eddie, it’s wasted on the kid—he’s not picking up your signals, he isn’t on that wavelength at all. Sit down and tell us how things are going. Want a drink?”
“Got any gin? Or just that dago red wine you like?”
“Sorry. Dago red is all there is. You drank up all that was left of the gin last time you were here.”
“Skip it; I’d rather drink red ink.” Eddie perched on the foot of the bed beside Tommy, nudging close to him. He used his hands, which were square and beautifully manicured, to illustrate every phrase. Despite the heavy masculine body, the heavy shadow of beard around his chin, he seemed to be trying to act—Tommy put it crudely to himself—as sissy as he could. It made Tommy nervous, with an old apprehension.
“Matt, I simply forgot to tell you, Bart Reeder finally got a good part!”
“Bart? Nightclub? Cabaret?”
“No, no, darling, an honest-to-God part in an honest-to-God movie. No walk-on, either—a good part opposite Louise Lanart. They say he had to sleep with Johnny Mac—you know who I mean—to get it, but it’s a fat part romancing Lanart—”
The Catch Trap Page 35