“I saw the whole thing.”
“The kid’s okay, though. He went right up again.”
“Yeah, after you conned him for ten minutes. Get out of the way, willya? I want to clean up, if you don’t mind.”
Mario lowered the towel, his face dripping. “What’s eating on you?”
“Boy, you sure have changed! I remember when Barbie pulled a freeze on the bar, you had Liss climb up and unfasten the bar and spill her.”
Mario shrugged. “You can’t treat everybody the same way. I didn’t want to discourage the kid.”
Tommy snorted. “I remember the first time you let me come up. you told me if I was just kidding around, the sooner I got sick of it, the better! If I’d pulled something like that on the rig, you’d have chased me away from the rig and I’d never have got up there again—and I knew it! And I remember when I fainted once on the rig and got sick, you made me go right up again, sick or not.”
Mario put the towel down on a chair. “Look, Tom,” he said, “you were a born flyer, and you’d been working up high since you were out of short pants. I didn’t have to baby you.”
“If the kid has to be babied, I don’t see why you bother!”
“He’s been hanging around all summer, watching me work all season. And what is it to you, anyhow? Why are you making such a thing of it?”
“Because I know why you take so much trouble with kids about that age. Yeah, you like them just about fourteen, don’t you? I ought to know.”
Mario turned deathly white under his tan. “All right. You said it. You got it off your chest. Now you take it back or I’ll kill you.”
“You try it,” Tommy said between his teeth. “I’m not fifteen years old anymore. You want somebody around you can make a big fuss over when you’re in the mood for that, and con into bed when you’re in the mood for that, and then slap hell out of it you feel like it. Well, you better start making up to your little chum, because, man, I spent the last five years learning to take care of myself, and if you take a swing at me, I’m going to hit you back so damn hard you’ll light down in the bullpen!”
“Tom, take back that crack about the kid.”
“How come you feel you have to protect his honor?” Tommy asked, his lip curling, and Mario hit him. Without a moment’s hesitation, Tommy brought up a fist and drove it hard into Mario’s diaphragm.
Mario doubled up with a startled “Ugh!” then lunged at Tommy. A chair went over with a crash, and they went with it, struggling.
Someone banged at the door. Mario was on his feet in an instant. “Hold it,” he said, and yanked the door open. Paul Reddick stared at his cut lip, at the overturned chair.
“What the hell . . .” he said. “What the hell—”
With a shocked, terrible sense of deja vu—he could almost see Angelo’s face—Tommy sat up. “For Christ’s sake, Matt,” Reddick said, “Blanding could soak you with a fine for brawling on the lot!”
Mario wiped blood from his lip. “This isn’t a brawl, Paul, it’s a family row.”
“Better keep it down, then.”
Tommy got out a handkerchief and thrust it against his nose, which had begun to bleed. “Who asked you to come butting in?”
Reddick ignored him. “Matt, you want me to get some ice for that lip? It’s going to be a beaut by showtime.” He turned to Tommy. “You lousy punk, where the hell do you get the idea you can get away with beating up the performers? I ought to run you off the lot!”
“You try it,” Tommy said in a rage, but Mario shook off Reddick’s hand on his arm.
“Shut up, Tom,” he ordered. “Go do your work before we have the boss on our necks.”
“Blanding—” Tommy started to say what Blanding could do, when he caught Mario’s eye. There was desperate appeal in it.
“Look, Paul,” Mario said to Reddick, “the kid and I have been fighting nonstop since he grew out of knee pants.”
His look said, I’ll handle Reddick. Tommy muttered, “Yeah, sure,” and left the trailer. He heard Reddick laughing even before he was out of earshot, and he moved toward the horse lot, shaking with rage. He was ready to walk straight to his car, off the lot, out of Mario’s life. He felt sick at the memory of Mario’s arm around Jack Chandler’s shoulders, at the humility and promptness with which Mario—Mario Santelli of the Flying Santellis—had humbled himself before Paul Reddick. But old habit took him to the flying rig to check it before the show.
Keep it off the platform.
That was, after all, the crux of the problem. Mario had been working with the Chandler kid.
In the intermission Tommy slipped back to the trailer while Mario was getting into his tights.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll fix your face.”
“Okay. It could use some fixing.”
Tommy pulled open the drawer where Mario kept his makeup materials. He covered the cut lip with flesh-colored adhesive and worked tinted cream into the darkening bruise around the eye. By habit, not realizing what he was doing until he found himself doing it, he picked up Mario’s comb and combed the thick hair with the precise touch he had learned years ago and had never forgotten. Mario reached up and closed, his hand over Tommy’s.
“You missed your profession, kid. You could make a living any day in Hollywood as a makeup man.”
“That might be good to know, someday. Clench your fists.” Tommy took the roll of tape.
“Put it on good and tight. That’s the one I broke.” But as Tommy began strapping his wrists, Mario shut his eyes. “God, kid, we’re right back where we were, aren’t we? Least little thing, we start tearing at each other—”
“Hold it, hold it!” Tommy snarled. “Not just before a show—you nuts or something?”
Mario started to laugh, deep down in his belly.
“Ragazzo,” he said, “you are just too damn good to be true. Okay, fella.”
But though he spoke lightly, there was something behind the voice that made Tommy brood.
My God, he’s a wreck, if he can start that kind of talk five minutes before he goes on the rig! What else had those years done to Mario in ways that did not show on the surface?
He came back to their trailer after the night show to find Mario there, cooking bacon and eggs. Tommy washed up without speaking, dug in the drawer for knives and forks, and sat down. They ate without speaking until Tommy shoved his plate away. Then Mario leaned both elbows on the table.
“Kid, listen. We’re going right back to the same old pattern, aren’t we?”
Tommy stared at his plate, streaked with egg and crumbs. “I was thinking about that, too. If this is too rough, I can always pack my bag and move on. If we’re going to start that old stuff, slugging each other— Look, it was one thing when we were kids. But we’re a couple of hefty athletes now, and we have a few more fights like that, one of us will kill the other. How about it, fella? Want me to jump the show and just—drift?”
Mario put his face down on his clenched fists. He said into them, his voice drained of everything except exhaustion, “I’ve got no right to ask you to stay. But—but I’m begging you. If you walk out again, I don’t know what the hell I’ll do.”
Tommy stared at him in consternation. He got up and came around the table, laying a hand on the hunched shoulders.
“You got me wrong, Mario,” he said. “I’m not threatening to walk out on you. I’m asking would it be easier on you, you want me to get lost? If you want me to stay, hell, you couldn’t chase me off with an M-one.”
Mario raised his head. The tape had come off his mouth and it was bleeding again. “Why in hell did you make that filthy crack about the kid?”
Tommy wanted to yell, Was it true, or wasn’t it? But he waited to control his voice. “Okay. So I was jealous.”
Mario put a hand over Tommy’s. He said, very low, “You’ve got no reason to be jealous, Lucky. Of anybody. You want me to run the kid off, I’ll run him off.”
Tommy stared at the floor. “He
ll, no. Last thing we want is a reputation for being exclusive, a twosome.” Then, out of the remnants of fury, he blurted, “I get sore. Watching you suck up to a jerk like Reddick.”
There was a long silence in the trailer. “Tommy,” Mario said at last, “Paul took me on when I was scraping the bottom. A bum. Nowhere. Like I told you, I spent a year bumming around in Mexico. I worked a carnival down there. Came back up at Tijuana and took a job working the rottenest grift show in the States—work hand, roustabout in a carny on the border, taking tickets on the midway, running a penny pitch. You think I’m a mess now, you should’ve seen me then.” He was silent, lost in memory, his eyes distant, finally getting up the nerve to say, “I got thrown out of that show, and did sixty days in jail in El Paso.”
“Christ! What for?”
“What the hell do you think? The public defender got the charge reduced to disorderly conduct, otherwise I could have gone up for ten years. That was Texas.” After a minute he added, staring at the floor, “The kid had red hair. Well, hell, he wasn’t a kid—he was from the Air Force base.”
Tommy didn’t trust himself to speak.
“Pour me some coffee, okay?” Mario held out his cup. Tommy slopped coffee into it, not noticing when he spilled some on Mario’s hand. Mario took the pot from him and put it on the stove.
“I got out, started looking for a job. I heard Blanding was short of acts, and he sent me around to see Reddick. I leveled with Paul. We—we sort of hit it off. He took me on, gave me an advance out of his own pocket, nursed me along easy until I started to get back in shape and was on my feet again. Only thing is, I didn’t tell him I ever used the Santelli name. He covered with the boss—Blanding wouldn’t hire anyone who’d done time. I’d never have made it on my own, Tom.”
Tommy wanted to ask other questions, but was sure he would get no answers. Presumptuously, he had thought he was helping Mario out of the depths. Now he found he had had no idea of what those depths had been. “Reddick—is he queer?”
Mario hesitated a long time before answering, and finally said, “I think maybe. Only he—he fights it. Some men do. He never said so in so many words, only what I told him didn’t turn him off, either. Maybe I’m just not his type or something. But I owe him a lot.” There was another hesitation, then: “Look, Lucky, about the kid—Jack—look, I wouldn’t carry on, not on the lot, not where it could get back to the boss and get Paul in trouble.”
“Jeez,” Tommy said at last, “you make me feel about two inches high.”
Mario reached across the table and gripped his hand. “That wasn’t what I had in mind, ragazzo. Only, like I say, Paul’s not a bad guy.” He got up, withdrawing, embarrassed, in the old way. “That coffee’s lousy. I’ll make some more.”
He moved around the trailer, finally coming back to where Tommy sat slumped at the table.
“Kid. We can usually get through to each other if we keep our tempers. Let’s promise each other not to get into this kind of wrangle again, huh?”
Tommy felt as if he were coming apart with the old, half-forgotten ache. “We haven’t had much luck keep promises.”
“No,” Mario said through a constricted’ throat. “Does it help to know I’m so goddamned ashamed of myself I could die?”
Tommy shook his head without speaking. If anything, it made it worse. He knew, deep down where the deepest knowledge was born, that this time they must stay together or go under, but he was not sure why. He wasn’t sophisticated enough, or philosopher enough, to think of himself as the instrument of Mario’s salvation, but he had in a sense been walking on tiptoe around a thought something like that, and now he, too, was profoundly ashamed of his presumption. He knew now how much more selfish than that it was.
It’s my job to get him back to the Coast in one piece. But it’s because I need to have him in one piece.
But we’ve got to find some way to live together without tearing each other up this way. And that’s my job, because his nerves are all to pieces, and mine are in pretty good shape.
He leaned his head back against Mario, then turned and put his arms around Mario’s waist. He did not realize it was, by instinct, a gesture he had made often when he was a little boy. “Hell, fella,” he murmured, “if it did you any good to beat me up, I’d probably let you. But it just makes you tear yourself up that much worse afterward.”
“Oh, you crazy kid,” Mario whispered, “you crazy dumb kid!” And then, without transition, their solemn, pledging handclasp became a tense, struggling embrace. For the first time Tommy got a glimmering of how this tension worked in Mario; then thought vanished. For a minute they only clung together, as if by some mystic process they could actually mold and press their aching bodies into one another—as always, breathless and clumsy with the necessary awkwardness of two males, with the brief brutal resentment at the refusal of their bodies to come together spontaneously into the perfect pattern of the need in them. Then Mario muttered, “Come on, damn it, come on,” and pushed him down on the couch. They didn’t even bother to pull off their clothes.
The next day Blanding came and stood watching them for a few minutes. Then he signaled to Tommy.
“I was watching you the other day. I told you if you could do something in the show I’d give you a raise. Want to go on with the flyers?”
“What will Reddick say?”
“What Mister Reddick says don’t signify, sonny. I’ll talk to Reddick.”
Paul Reddick knocked at their trailer door some hours later, trying to be genial. “Matt, the boss wants to put your kid brother in the act. How about it?”
“Okay by me,” he said with a shrug, but when Reddick had gone, he turned on Tommy, scowling. “What the hell—”
“Look, this is the first I heard of it. Blanding just walked up to me this morning and asked how did I feel about it.”
Mario stared at him sharply, then relaxed. “Yeah, I know—Blanding’s so crazy for acts he’d have the Chandler kid up there if I’d hold still for it.”
“At that he wouldn’t be much worse than Ina Reddick.”
Mario grimaced. “Careful; don’t let Blanding hear you say that. She’s Blanding’s sister.”
~o0o~
It felt strange to be before an audience again. Some people in these small towns had perhaps seen him performing with Lambeth when he was only a child. On the pedestal he felt a positive itch to correct Ina Reddick’s timing, to move her forcibly into a more classic stance, and wondered how Mario could go through the slipshod routine without his old passion for teaching, for perfection, showing up. Had he lost it entirely?
Tommy had the nervousness any flyer feels about a strange catcher. And yet they were all trusting one another with their lives. Paul and Ina Reddick knew nothing about him, yet they were willing to take Mario’s word and trust themselves to him. How did they feel about having a newcomer thrust into their act? They were, after all, professionals.
After the show Ina Reddick came up to them. “Come over to the trailer when you get dressed,” she said. “We’ve got to honor the successful debut some way.”
The Reddick trailer was larger than the one Tommy shared with Mario, clean and curtained, a small yapping puppy on a leash. There was coffee and cold beer, and sandwiches made with thick slices of liverwurst. They ate gratefully, and Ina, stretched lazily on a bunk, her long, crimson toenailed feet bare, watched them with a smile. Paul handed her a beaded can of beer.
“You celebrate, too, Ina.”
“Coffee, thanks—I can’t afford to put on any weight.” She turned on her side with a grin. “Okay, Matt, come clean. Who are you two really? I saw that pass before, only I know perfectly well the name wasn’t Gardner. There’s a Gardner used to be with Freres and Stratton, only he worked with a blonde girl and did double-traps—”
“That’s my brother Johnny and his wife,” Mario said after a moment, and Tommy realized that they were singularly unlucky. Like Randy Starr, Ina Reddick had one of those freak memories some
times found in show business; she never forgot a face or a performance.
“Now, what the hell was it? It wasn’t with Starr’s when I saw them a couple years back. Carey-Carmichael, Woods-Wayland—” She sat up suddenly and pointed. “Some small show,” she said, “somewhere in Oklahoma. You were just a little kid”—she nodded to Tommy—”and the two of you did some trick on one trapeze, some kind of duo routine. There was an old man in the show—” She frowned and bit her lip, working on the memory. Suddenly she snapped her fingers.
“Lambeth. That was it. Flying Santellis.”
“Mario Santelli,” Paul said slowly. “Yeah. I heard the kid call you Mario once.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Ina said. “Later you were with Starr’s. They were comparing you with Barney Parrish! You hiding from the law or something?”
“I didn’t lie about anything. My legal name is Matthew Gardner. Only the Santelli act broke up after my grandfather died, and I wouldn’t sell the name this cheap.”
“Yeah,” Paul said wryly, “I guess it is a comedown from Starr’s. Hell, you were doing triples. You could have leveled with me—I wouldn’t have given you away,” he added, and Tommy picked up the injured note of jealousy in his voice.
A lot of flying is sublimated homosexuality. Only most people never think about it . . . .
“We ought to be honored,” Ina said. “Guess I’ll have that beer. We start out celebrating a kid getting a break and come to find out it’s a famous team making a comeback.”
The sarcasm flicked a raw nerve. “Knock it off,” Tommy said. “We didn’t volunteer this; you dragged it out of us.”
“Okay, okay, so let’s celebrate.” Paul too sounded awkward. “Have a beer, Matt, Tom.”
Tommy accepted the beer. “First time I’ve done any flying since”—he became aware of Mario’s repressive frown—“since I went in the Army. Can’t let Mrs. Reddick drink alone.”
“Ina,” she said, smiling, and Tommy felt a premonitory flash of warning.
Trouble.
Paul said, “Guess I know now why you seemed to be throwing your weight around some. How in the dickens did you two ever end up in a spot like this?”
The Catch Trap Page 56