“What do the train whistles say to you, ragazzo?”
Tommy thought about that. “They say, ‘I’m lo-onely, lonely!’”
“Well, tell ’em they’re lying—I’m here,” Mario said, and put his arms around Tommy, and the shadow was gone.
Only once, on a long night run while they lay awake with rain splashing down the black window, Mario tense and restless because that afternoon he had attempted the triple and faulted and fallen (he hated doing this in the ring, though a hundred falls at rehearsal left him cheerful), did he speak of the past.
“Train whistles always make me feel like a little kid. I grew up on a circus train, you know.”
“I know. Lucia told me.”
“Liss and I used to say that the train whistles were saying, ‘Andiamo, me vo, ma non so dove . . . .’”
Tommy knew enough Italian now to translate: Let’s go, I’m going, but I don’t know where.
“It used to scare me. To go to bed and not know where we’d wake up, Liss used to try to tell me it didn’t matter because wherever we were going, we were all on the train and all together anyhow, but I used to get scared. I used to wake up at night and think everybody else in the world was asleep, just me and the train whistles not knowing where we were going. And I’d climb down and wake her up just so I wouldn’t be all alone in the world with the train whistles—”
Tommy said hesitantly, for Mario had not mentioned it since the contract was signed, “It’s too bad Liss couldn’t have been with us this year.”
Mario only stared bleakly at the rain washing down the window and said, “Well, Stella’s doing okay,” in a voice that closed the subject, tied it up, sealed it, and dumped it into an unbridged river.
Tommy grew his final half inch this season—he would never be tall—and gained four pounds before July first. Papa Tony allowed him to do a one-and-a-half in the ring and to attempt a back double in rehearsal, and there he stopped him.
“When you’re eighteen,” he said, “you can try anything you want to. For now it’s enough.”
Tommy had been taught not to argue, but Papa Tony saw the flash of rebellion in his eyes and said, “Go on, say it.”
“Papa Tony, I want to work on a couple of the big tricks. Just practice them, in rehearsal. Mario was doing a two-and-a-half when he was seventeen, and I’ll be that old next season.”
“Yes,” said the old man slowly, “but if I had known what I know now, I would never have allowed it. I let him accomplish too much while he was still too young, and there was no place left for him to go; he had to break his heart, and try to break his neck, on that accursed triple.”
“You didn’t want him to do it?” This seemed incredible to Tommy. It was the triple that would make the Santellis famous again, and that was what Papa Tony seemed to care about most.
Slowly the old man shook his head. “No, I didn’t want him to. I didn’t know why he had to; I just knew he had to and I couldn’t stop him. There was ‘a reason they called that triple the salto mortale—that’s, let me think, in English that’s ‘the leap of death,’ ‘the fatal leap,’ but I think for him it is more than that, maybe—” Again he stopped and thought for a moment. “I think for him maybe it meant the leap of fate. Does that mean anything to you, Tommy?”
It did. Tommy stood tongue-tied, looking at the old man. It had never occurred to him that harsh, practical Antonio Santelli ever thought about things like this.
“Save something for yourself to accomplish, Tommy. For Matt, I think, it became the only thing fate had left for him to do. It’s a long life when you reach the top too soon and there’s no place left to go but down. And then if you don’t break your neck you will break your heart—” He stopped, laughing the short laugh he gave when he was embarrassed. “So, so,” he said, “again the old man is making speeches.” He reached out and patted Tommy’s shoulder. “And what business have you working on the big tricks when you fling your arms around you like a baby camel in the net?”
As they worked across the country and began to settle into the new life with its orderly pattern of nights and days, they began to have some leisure to understand what was going on around them. Tommy, who, with Lambeth and in the Santelli household, had begun to divide people clannishly into a few he knew very well and the faceless thousands beyond the lights of the ring, found himself, in this larger area, more sociable. He struck up a friendship with twin brothers his own age from a family of French equestrians, and soon picked up enough French to talk to them easily. An old clown taught him more about makeup, between a matinee and a night show, than he had learned in three years with Lambeth. The clown had once been a well-known stage magician, with the bad luck to lose two fingers in a firecracker accident.
There were flurries, emergencies. The oldest brother of a family of British cycle riders steered his cycle an inch too close to the edge of the balance stage and five piled-up riders fell in a shower of falling bodies, lighting miraculously without injuries except for the youngest top-mounter, little Isabella Byrd, who had knocked out two teeth and was carried out of the ring tearless and amazed. Her big sister Sally, on whose head she had knocked out the teeth, remarked that thank goodness they were only baby teeth and would grow back eventually, and put Isabella to bed cheerfully anticipating a shilling for each of them—at eight, Isabella still did not understand American money. One of the girl flyers in the other end ring went into the net and broke her wrist, and Stella, who had started the season riding in the spec and working in the tumbling act—there was no room for a woman in the flying act as the Santellis had designed it for Woods-Wayland—took her place. And Mario had somehow taken it into his head that he would like to learn to cross a tight wire, and to everyone’s amazement, in less than a month of practice, he had learned to cross without a balance pole—which, since the wirewalkers performed without a safety net, sent Papa Tony into his fiercest tantrum of the season.
Tommy had had only random and occasional word from his family; he had expected no more. In the months he had spent with the Santellis, his mother had sent him only a dozen brief notes, with hastily scribbled messages of love and admonitions to be a good boy and keep well. He kept track of the route of Lambeth Circus, more from curiosity than homesickness.
One Saturday afternoon, with a few minutes to rest before getting ready for the flying act in the second half of the show, he was walking along “Clown Alley.” The clowns had the long edge of the dressing top sidewall reserved for them; because of their enormous amounts of makeup and their many costumes, they were each allotted twice the dressing-tent space of any other performer. Making his way through the precisely lined-up trunks to the spot where the Santellis had their permanent location in the tent, he passed that of Coe Wayland, the aerial manager, who worked in the tumbling act with them in the first half of the show. Wayland was dressing to go out front for the second half, where he took charge of the box office. As Tommy went past, Wayland slammed down the lid of his trunk, but not before Tommy had seen the square bottle and the glass he hurriedly thrust under his discarded tights.
Tommy stared without meaning to. Drinking on the lot, officially forbidden, was winked at if the performers were sober during the show, but acrobats and aerialists were normally abstemious men, fearing that even an occasional drink would damage their coordination. Papa Tony had once bawled out Angelo for pouring himself an extra glass of wine, and that was on Sunday, when there wasn’t any show. Even a work hand or canvas man could be fired without notice for being drunk in public. But the few who did drink, did so openly; the idea of secretly drinking was something completely new to Tommy.
Wayland looked up and demanded, “What you staring at, Red?”
What the heck, Tommy thought, his part in the show’s over. You don’t need to be sober to count the gate money. He said the first thing that popped into his head. “You got the new Billboard? I saw Eddie the Gimp driving on the lot with the truck, right before the matinee, and I didn’t have time to pi
ck it up. Can I see it?”
“Yeah, I’m through reading it,” Coe Wayland said, and chuckled. He was a thickset bullnecked man, handsome in a coarse way. “What you want with Billboard, kid?” he asked with heavy-handed humor. “Looking for a new job, maybe, where you’ll get center ring in a solo spot?”
“I want to look up the routes, find out where Lambeth Shows is playing this week,” Tommy improvised.
“Come on, Red,” Wayland said, still jocular, “what you want with that two-bit mud show? You’re doing all right here with us, aren’t you? Somebody on the lot not nice to you, kid? You come and tell old Uncle Coe, I’ll fix his wagon!”
“I grew up with that two-bit mud show,” Tommy said. “I want to see where my folks are playing.”
“That’s right, you’re not a Santelli, are you? I remember seeing you had another name on the contract,” Wayland said. “How’d you come to get flying with the Santellis? They make such a big show of being all family, their nice tight little clique, I thought you either had to marry into them or be born into them. Was it you or your parents?”
“Neither.” Tommy said. “The Santellis were working with Lambeth and Mario taught me to fly.”
“You don’t look a lot like them, and that’s a fact,” Wayland said. “They’re Eye-talians or something, aren’t they? For all Johnny’s so blond. What they do, Red, pick you for your good looks, so they’d have one blond, one brunette, and one redhead, huh?” He was close to Tommy; Tommy could smell the whiskey on his breath, and it made him uneasy. Wayland asked, “Your folks flyers, too?”
Tommy shook his head. “No, my dad’s a cat trainer with Lambeth. Tom Zane. I wanted to see where they’re playing this week.”
Coe Wayland’s jaw dropped. He stood staring at Tommy.
“Christamighty,” he said, “you’re that Zane? You’re their kid?”
“Something wrong with that?” Tommy demanded. “Hey, why are you staring at me like that—has my face turned green or something?”
“Old Tony—he’s your legal guardian, then?”
“I guess so,” Tommy said. “Why?”
“Good thing you were here, wasn’t it? Or—oh, my God,” Wayland said, and abruptly turned away from him, taking up his jacket, knotting his tie. “Scram, kid. Run along. I got to get out front.”
What the heck? Tommy was completely baffled. Is he drunk? “Can I take the Billboard? You said you were through with it.”
“Well, I’m not. I haven’t got it,” Coe Wayland said, his back turned to Tommy. “Run along, scram, go talk to Tony Santelli. G’wan!” And as Tommy, frowning, turned away, Wayland called after him, with drunken intensity, “Hey, Tommy—take it easy, kid, okay?”
Either that guy is nuts, or drunk. Tommy came to the place where the Santelli trunks were lined up; his own was opened, his costume for the flying act laid out on top of the tray. Mario was standing on one foot, half naked, getting into his tights. “You’re late,” he said. “You better start getting ready.”
Tommy hauled down the black tights he wore for the tumbling act. “Cheapskate!” he said disgustedly.
“Who? Me?” Mario demanded, amused.
“That dumb creep Wayland,” Tommy said. “He’s always bumming copies of Billboard off other people, like it would break his bankroll to buy his own copy, but he’s got the new one, and when I asked could I see it a minute to check the route for Lambeth’s, he lied about it—he said he didn’t have it, and I could see it laying right there on his trunk. How chintzy can you get?”
“That one,” said Papa Tony, combing his hair before the mirror on the board between his trunk and Angelo’s that made a kind of temporary dressing table, “he is too fond of his bottle.”
Angelo shrugged. “What can you do? He’s the boss’s brother. Anybody else would be booted off the lot.”
Mario said, muffled, his head just emerging from his costume top, “I heard he was flying up to this year and his partner went and quit on him.”
“You blame him?” Tommy asked. He knotted the laces of his tights, then bent to slide his feet into his flying slippers. “Anybody as cheap as that, he probably made him use secondhand adhesive tape on the bars, or something. He’s so damn cheap he washes and irons his toilet paper!”
“Come, come,” Papa Tony reproved, “this is no time for gossiping! Where is Johnny?” he demanded, looking at Johnny’s trunk beside theirs.
“He’s already dressed,” Mario said. “I guess he went to get a drink of water or something. Here he is, coming back—” Tommy raised his head and saw Johnny coming toward them; Tommy noticed he had a new Billboard under his arm. Johnny laid it on his trunk and Tommy grabbed it up, but Mario caught him by the arm. He said, suddenly harsh, “You got other things to do than sit around reading Billboard. Go on, ragazzo, get outside. We’re going to be late!”
“You crazy or something? We got five minutes,” Tommy protested, but Mario shoved him on, and Tommy went, fuming. Most of the time, he and Mario were friendly, casual equals; then suddenly, over nothing, Mario would pull rank on him and start ordering him around like he was a little kid! “I just wanted to see where my folks were playing this week,” he said, but Mario ignored him.
What the heck is wrong, anyway? What’s going on? But then they were in the back door, the performers’ entrance, and he forgot, as he had been trained to put aside all small personal problems and preoccupations. Between shows, Mario unexpectedly asked him if he was tired of cookhouse food, and took him out to a Chinese restaurant in the city. It was rare for Mario to take him anywhere alone, but they had spent so long now as Santelli grandsons on the lot of the Woods-Wayland Circus that neither of them was self-conscious about it. Mario was unusually gentle and companionable, almost lover like. The bus out to the circus lot, when they returned for the night show, was almost empty, and Mario surreptitiously slipped his hand into Tommy’s and held it.
“What did you get in your fortune cookie?” Tommy asked. He unfolded the tiny slip of paper and reread it; “You will receive some unexpected news.”
Mario twisted his mouth into his exaggerated, clown’s grin, and Tommy winced; normally Mario did that only when he was upset. “Mine says, Help! I am a prisoner in a fortune-cookie factory!”
“Ah, come on,” Tommy said, digested, “I heard that one when I was six years old!”
Mario crumpled the tiny scrap of paper and threw it Out the bus window. “It’s all a lot of crap anyhow,” he said. The bus pulled into the circus lot and Mario jumped down. “Come on, let’s hurry. We cut it kind of fine, and if we’re late Papa won’t let us do this kind of thing anymore.”
Papa Tony was sitting on his trunk, dressed, going through some papers. Tommy saw a square yellow form, and as they walked out for the tumbling act, he asked, “Hey, Mario, has Liss had her baby?”
“I hope not,” Mario said. “It’s not due till September.”
“Well, Papa Tony had a telegram, and that was all I could think of. Everything’s okay, isn’t it, Mario?” he asked, suddenly fearful. The strange way Coe Wayland had acted, Mario being so unexpectedly kind to him.
Mario said harshly, “If it’s any of your business, Papa will tell you when the time comes. So he had a telegram. Don’t be so damn nosy!” For a moment Tommy relaxed—Mario was back to normal—but then he grew frightened all over again. When Stella joined them for the tumbling act, she looked at him quickly and away again. At the top of the rigging he could put it all aside, as he had been taught to put everything aside. Up there nothing matters, absolutely nothing, except whether I get off the bar straight. But he came back, after the flying act, in numb, growing apprehension. What was happening? What weren’t they telling him?
Around them the work hands were stripping the dressing tent; the flying act was the last part of the show, and already the other performers’ trunks had gone and most of the tent was bare around them, already carted off to the circus train. Papa Tony put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder, and suddenly his fea
r spilled over.
“What’s going on? What’s wrong? What is it you’re not telling me? Why are you all looking at me like that? It’s like somebody’s dead—”
Angelo put an arm around him. “Come and sit down, Tommy,” he said gently, “we got something to tell you—” but Tommy lunged, grabbing the copy of Billboard on Papa Tony’s trunk.
“No!” Mario said urgently. “Grab it, Johnny, don’t—” But Tommy was already turning through the pages, quickly, afraid, stopping at the headline: Couple Perish At Railroad Crossing. He read it, quickly, in snatches.
Tom Zane, animal trainer with Lambeth Circus . . . car and trailer instantly demolished . . . Beth Zane, his wife . . . .
“Oh, God,” he said numbly. “And I didn’t even know. I should have been there, I should have been with them—”
Angelo said, his arm tight around Tommy, his voice rough and gentle, “No, kid. No. If they knew anything at all, probably the last thing they thought about was to be glad you weren’t with them, that you were okay.”
The Catch Trap Page 42