“You drunken bum!”
Johnny took the glass and said in angry disgust, “So that’s how you warm up for the show! I didn’t believe it when they told me!”
“Easy, fellas,” Coe Wayland said, rocking back on his heels and smiling. Even in this confusion it struck Tommy that he was handsome, standing there, strongly muscled, good-looking in tights, his ruddy face flushed with that affable smile. In his own way he had the same grace as Johnny and Mario. At this most inappropriate of moments the thought flashed through Tommy’s head—A lot of the best flying is sublimated homosexuality—and he cut it off, in horror.
“Look, Matt,” Wayland said, “I been in this business a long time, I know what I can handle. I work better with a couple of shots inside me. It relaxes me. Trust me. Hell, I been doing it all season, you ought to know by now that I can handle it.”
Johnny and Mario looked at one another, their personal quarrel forgotten. Johnny said, “Listen, this is nothing to mess around with. Go back to the tent, Wayland. We’ll cover for you with the boss tonight, but this is the end. Nobody who drinks goes on with us. Right, Matt?”
“Right,” Mario said.
Johnny took charge. “Look, we’ll skip the duo routines tonight. Stella, scoot and tell one of the girls to slip the word to the bandmaster.” Even now Tommy had to admire Johnny’s talent for quick thinking in any crisis. “Listen, Matt, you and Tommy start with two crosses apiece—say a plange and a half twist for him, and you do a forward flyover and return pirouette and then a back double. Then let Stel do her fancy passes, the ones she did today, and you and Tom finish up with the midair pass—we’re all too shook for the triple. Got it?”
“Sure,” Mario said quickly. “Got it, Tom?” Quickly he ran through the list again. The band crashed into their entrance music, and the brothers stretched out their hands and shook quickly.
“Okay, big brother, forget it,” Johnny said.
Coe Wayland was standing, arms akimbo, surveying them. He grinned wickedly. “Ain’t you fellas forgetting something? Think you can keep me off that rig? After all that ruckus today, all you folks need is another row, and your name is going to be mud.”
“Use your head, Coe,” Johnny said. “Go sleep it off or something. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. We’re on!”
Coe turned on them, raging. “You know-it-all bastards think you can keep me off that rig?” He forced his way between Mario and Johnny. “I’m going on, unless you want a fight right out in Center Ring! Think you can stop me, Fancy Dan?”
Mario’s face paled. Without warning he drew back his hand and chopped hard at Coe Wayland’s neck. The man gave one startled grunt and fell. “Whew!” Johnny whistled, but he caught the sagging form and shoved him at a startled work hand while the ring announcer blared out:
“And in the Cen-ter Ring—Lay-deez and—Gen-tle-men —The Flying Santellis!”
“Andiamo,” said Johnny with a devilish grin, and tucked his arm into Mario’s, Mario held out his free arm to Tommy, and, three abreast, they walked into the center spotlight, pausing there for Stella to join them as she came from the bandstand. Tommy, his hand tucked through Mario’s arm, realized that whatever had done it—the need to lock ranks against the outsider—Mario was himself again.
Alone in their compartment, hours later, Mario sat in the lower berth, his head in his hands. He looked pale and ravaged, but he raised his head and broke into shaky laughter as Tommy came in from the corridor.
“Did Coe Wayland get on the train okay?”
“Sure,” said Tommy, “but he’s sore as a rogue elephant on a rampage. Jeez, Mario, he’s all set to murder somebody!”
Mario gave a wry, short laugh. “First he’d have to admit he was drunk as a skunk, and I can’t see him doing that. Hasn’t this just been one hell of a day?”
He stood up, put his hands on Tommy’s shoulders, and gently turned him around. “Lucky . . . .” he said, pleading.
Tommy pushed him away. “You go to hell. What do you think I’m made of, anyway?”
“You want me to get on my knees to you?” Mario seized him by the shoulders, and Tommy flinched, afraid of the violence in voice and hands. Mario saw it, and let him go. He muttered something in Italian, slumping into his bunk.
Tommy said, shaking, “This year we’ve been getting away with murder. I thought we had it pretty good. And then you start that stuff up in the dressing top—and damn near break my shoulder—” Afraid he would cry with the remembered humiliation and pain, he turned away: “Sometimes I think you must be crazy!”
“I act like it, don’t I? Lucky, does it help to know I’m so ashamed I could die?”
It didn’t. If anything, it made it worse. “You always are,” Tommy said, without turning around. Then he begged, his voice cracking, “Mario, what are we going to do about it? Have we just been getting on each other’s nerves? You want to split up a while, bunk with somebody else?”
“No!” Mario said in a hoarse, terrible voice, and pulled Tommy into a violent embrace. They stood close together in the swaying compartment, strained and immobile, and it flashed through Tommy’s mind that an explosion of violence was almost a relief from the agony of so much emotion. Then, without warning, the tension went out of Mario’s face and he leaned forward and laid his mouth against Tommy’s.
“Next time, damn it, you kick my teeth in first, before I get in that state.” He looked exhausted, but the inhuman misery was gone.
When he says, “Leave me alone,” he’s begging me for help, and I didn’t have the brains to know it.
Mario turned him gently around. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Sore as hell.”
“You better let me rub out the kinks. Or you want me to ask Johnny to come in and work it over?”
Tommy shook his head. Johnny sees too much. He pulled off his shirt and lay down in Mario’s bunk. Mario, sitting down beside him, began massaging the sore muscles, his hands impersonal and hard.
“That better?”
“Yeah, fine now.”
Mario went on rubbing the muscle; gradually, the touch merged into a caress. Then he took Tommy’s shoulders between his hands and gently turned him over. Smiling, he bent over him.
“We got some unfinished business,” he murmured, “something we started in Lawton, Oklahoma—remember? And we’re not in the dressing tent now.” He was in the bunk now, stretched full length, his body covering Tommy, his hands resting on the pillow on either side of Tommy’s head. At that moment Tommy felt that all the pain and despair of the day, all the misery and the humiliation, were worth it for moments like this. Mario’s lips closed slowly over his, and Tommy shut his eyes, giving way to it.
Then, frozen, aghast, Mario jerked his head up, staring white-faced at the open door of the compartment.
“Don’t let me interrupt anything,” Coe Wayland said. Tommy thought he had never seen such naked hate on a human face. “You bastards, I came here to crawl if I had to, beg you for another chance. You been going around like I was dirt under your feet, you rotten queers. Yeah, Fancy Dan here and his lover-boy, I came to beg you on my knees, to take the pledge. I got out of line, and I was going to come and apologize. But I see you’re too busy!”
The compartment door slammed. Tommy, who had fallen weakly against the wall, too stunned and shocked even to take in fully what had happened, heard Mario break into bitter, ringing laughter.
“In the words of a very famous clown,” Mario said at last, his voice only a ragged thread of exhaustion, “‘La commedia e finita’!”
The train rattled and swayed beneath them. Mario, still gasping exhausted, hysterical laughter, lurched to slide the bolt shut on the door. “Talk about locking stable doors after the horse—come here, piccino. Come on—”
“Look, Mario—” Tommy knelt beside him, frightened.
“Oh, hell, come on, what difference does it make now?” Mario said, with that terrible bitter laugh. “As far as we’re concerned, the season’s
over. Wait and see.”
He reached up and his arms closed around Tommy’s neck with a strangling grip. Tommy, letting Mario pull him down, sensing the desperation of the lost behind the laughter, wondered suddenly if this—this very disaster, this very exposure—was what Mario had been courting through the whole dreadful day.
INTERMISSION (1947-1952)
CHAPTER 1
March 1947
The winter quarters of the Starr Circus had not changed. There was the same familiar disorder of rehearsal tops, tractors, power lines snaking everywhere, animals being led across the lot, and the curious, empty look of any circus when there is not actually a performance going on: a look of being simultaneously deserted and jammed with mysterious hidden life somewhere behind the scenes.
Mario walked slowly across the trampled dry grass toward the aerialists’ rehearsal top where, just a year ago, they had auditioned for the Fortunatis. Just under the billowing flap, a thickset man looked out and called, “Be right with you!”
“Hello, Lionel.” They shook hands.
“Come on up to the office.” Lionel led the way through the tent and toward a small boxlike wagon, painted red. Inside there were a couple of crowded desks, two huge filing cabinets, a safe in the corner, and a couple of straight chairs. Lionel pulled out one of the chairs and motioned Mario to the other.
“How’s it going? How’s the family?”
“About as usual. How is Cleo?”
Lionel frowned slightly. “She’s walking again without crutches, and that’s miracle enough for us all. She’s finished flying, of course. Between ourselves, and not meaning anything ungallant, Cleo’s not so young anymore. Though, heaven knows, she doesn’t look a day older than she did when I started catching for her and Jim.”
Mario asked, “How’s she taking it, Lionel?”
Lionel glanced away. “She doesn’t say much. She’s coaching a couple of the girls from the show, and she seems to enjoy it. But you never can tell. Well, Matt, what have you all been doing this winter?”
“You know we left Woods-Wayland before the season ended—”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Along in October, we all went down to Mexico—Angelo was managing a show down there for a couple of months.”
“Has he really quit flying, Matt?”
“He says so, and he hasn’t worked out this spring at all. He was working for a while for a Mexican film company, as a—a—damn, I can’t think of the name for it—the guy who keeps all the horses in order while the stuntmen are falling on and off them. Anyhow, the horse boss. Then, after New Year’s, my brother Johnny and his wife went to the East Coast for a spring tour with a group that plays fairs, auditoriums, and so forth, and Tommy and I went to San Francisco for a couple of weeks to see if we could get work with some group Clint Redmann’s sending out. We got an offer from Freres and Stratton, but we haven’t come down that low. Not yet.”
“I should hope not!” Lionel said. “But you’re still looking for a summer booking? Look, the reason I called you down here wasn’t just to ask about the family. Now that both Cleo and Jim are through flying, I’m looking for a steady partner. And I saw you last year.”
Mario nodded thoughtfully. “You know the shape the Santellis are in. Tommy and I can’t carry it alone. We don’t even have a steady catcher. We thought, for a while, we could team up with Johnny and Stella, but they decided to work on their own this year.”
Lionel leaned his chin on his big hands, reflectively. “I know what your work is like, of course. We wanted you last year. But there’s a hitch. The kid, Tommy. What about him?”
Mario shrugged. “You saw him work last year, and he’s getting better all the time. We’ve spent three years developing those duo routines we do. We’re a team. We’ll give you top billing if you want it—Lionel Fortunati and the Flying Santellis—but we go together, Tom and me.”
Lionel shook his head. “I’m sorry, Matt. Can’t be done.”
“What’s wrong with it? The standard act is two flyers and a catcher—”
Lionel put his hands on the desk and straightened up.
“Matt. No offense, but I’ve got to say it. Grapevine has it that you spent those three years—how am I going to say this?—teaching the kid some duo routines you couldn’t do in public. Know what I mean? I mean, I heard why they fired you from Woods-Wayland.”
Mario did not move, but there was a quick wariness in his eyes. “They fired me from Woods-Wayland because I socked the boss’s brother when I caught him drunk in the ring.”
“Go ahead. You tell it your way.”
“First I’d like to know which version of the story you heard. I’ve heard it four different ways this winter.”
Lionel looked uneasily at the grilles on the window. “Way I heard it, you beat hell out of Coe Wayland because he walked into your compartment on the train without knocking, and found you and the kid in there—and you weren’t playing double solitaire.”
Mario locked his fingers together, struggling for composure. “Papa Tony wouldn’t have let Coe Wayland on a swinging ladder. He was a rotten catcher, and he was a drunk. Everybody with the show knew it and nobody could prove it, but one day Tommy caught him swilling down whiskey five minutes before we went on the rig. He got rambunctious and insisted on going on with us anyhow, so I decked him and put him down for the count. So we got on his shit list, and he snooped around listening at doors till he thought he had something on us. The next day he came around and tried to blackmail me into putting him back in the act. Instead I socked him on the chin and knocked out a couple of his teeth and told him to go peddle his goddamn dirt. So he went and peddled it to the boss, and I was out of a job.”
“But he did actually have something on you?”
“Lionel, I only go to confession on Good Friday.”
Lionel chuckled, then, abruptly, sobered. “If you—you personally, Matt—will give me your word of honor that Coe Wayland was just peddling smutty lies to get even with you, I’ll do my best to kill the story.”
“I don’t know what kind of dirt Wayland’s been spreading,” Mario said bleakly. “Like I said, I heard four different versions so far this year, and God knows how many others are floating around on the grapevine. I can’t chase them all down and deny all of them. Hell, you know the grapevine had it Cleo broke her back, not just a couple of bones in her hip.”
Lionel sighed. “Matt,” he said, “I’m almost twice your age. I’ve been around. I don’t shock easy. But let me give you some advice, as an old friend. You and the kid ought to split up before that story gets hung around your neck for good and you can’t get rid of it. Each of you, find yourselves new partners. I’ll take you on, and we’ll find another flyer or two—maybe a girl.”
“Maybe you’d like me to marry one, and hush the story up for good?” Mario said, and his slanting eyebrows flared in disdain.
“Well, that couldn’t hurt,” Lionel said.
“And just ditch the kid? The hell with that, Lionel. Tom and I are a team.”
“Not with me you’re not. I won’t take the two of you, that’s out. Look, I got nothing against the kid—what was his name? Zane? As I remember, he was a nice youngster, and Jim said he was the most promising kid he’d seen in years.”
“He is. You know he’s going to be damn good. You know enough about flying to know that, Lionel.”
“But not with a story like that dogging him all his life.”
Mario knotted his fingers together. Finally he said, “Let’s suppose, just for a minute, that Coe made up the whole story out of that filthy sewer he calls his mind. That whatever he said he saw, never happened. Look at it from my side, and Tom’s. I taught the kid to fly when he was just a little chap. We took him right into the family. Lucia, Angelo—they think the world of him. Now, wouldn’t it be a dirty trick to ditch him after all these years because Wayland likes to peddle filthy talk? If we break up now, wouldn’t it be damn near admitting the story is true, and g
etting it hung around his neck anyway?”
“You’ve got a point,” Lionel admitted, and stood up. “On the line, Matt? No offense? This wasn’t the first time I heard this particular story.” Mario started to speak, and Lionel gestured. “Let me finish, huh? Matt, your private morals are none of my business. I’m no small-town prig. But I’m no crusader, either. I’ve got two things to make a living with: a set of freak reflexes and the Fortunati name—and the prestige that goes with it. And I’m not going to risk that by tying it up with a couple of—” He hesitated, searching for a way to say it without giving offense.
“The word you’re looking for is queers,” Mario said, with an ironic curl of his lip, and Lionel shook his head, distressed.
“With a couple of kids who got themselves blacklisted by what must have been some awful damn foolishness, whether or not Wayland saw what it was he says he saw. So maybe you and the kid were practicing judo holds or washing each other’s backs—I couldn’t care less. What bothers me is that you couldn’t be bothered to protect your reputation, and the Santelli family name. That you left yourself wide open for Wayland to spread such a story in the first place. Got blacklisted.”
Mario dropped his face in his hands. Lionel had put his finger on his own guilt. “Is that straight, Lionel? Blacklisted?”
Lionel nodded. “The word’s gone out. Look, I’m willing to help you fight it, Matt, even if it’s just for Uncle Tony’s sake. I loved the old guy. But you’ve got to do something to help, too. If you ditch the kid now, we can probably kill it before it goes any further. But if you two insist on sticking together—hell, you know as well as I do. Wayland has a damn big mouth, and if you two are still together by the time he’s used it for a year or so, the name Santelli is going to stink from here to Sarasota.”
He added urgently, “Think of the kid, too. He’s a nice youngster. You want to kill off his career before it even starts? I’ve got a boy myself, about that age.”
The Catch Trap Page 51