Kitten on a Trampoline

by John D. MacDonald

  She gave me a stevedore grin, and such a backhanded crack across the middle that it nearly dropped me. “You stay and eat good, hah? You too tin and weak.”

  I watched all of the practice session. At the end Wanda wanted to try the triple. Charley wouldn’t let her. He told her she was a little bit off in her timing. She had fallen into the net twice. They both dropped, bounded, came to the edge of the net in that curious, wide wading walk and dropped lightly to the ground. She was sweaty and winded, and there was a net burn on the outside of her right leg.

  “You eating here?” she asked me.

  “Your mother invited me.”

  “Don’t get close to me. I smell like a horse. I’ll see you in a little while.”

  It was the most confusing house I’ve ever been in. There seemed to be four or five tiny living rooms, each with its own group. In one room three old ladies were gabbling at each other in a foreign tongue while they sewed sequins to heavy new material with a dazzling speed. People were singing, some were arguing, some were cooking and some were eating. Two television sets and a radio were going with the volume turned high. I estimate I met about one out of every four of them, and usually it was only the first name. They all had muscles, vitality and violent opinions. The children seemed able to run up the walls and across the ceiling, but I suspect that was an illusion. I remember one dreamlike sequence in particular. I was still waiting for Wanda to appear. Somebody had put an opened can of beer in my hand. I found a chair in a corner. A tired skinny little dog with ancient gray on his muzzle came trudging over and stared at me. Suddenly, as if arriving at a decision, he hoisted himself up onto his hind legs and jumped up and down a half dozen times. Then, with great elderly care, he rocked himself up onto his front legs and stood balanced there, looking sideways at me. “Nice doggie,” I said weakly. He stayed as he was, looking at me with sad, expectant patience.

  “He wants you to clap,” said a very tall and wonderfully beautiful girl in a thin little voice. I clapped. The dog dropped back to all fours, sighed, yawned and walked away.

  “That’s Captain Bligh,” she explained.

  “Oh.”

  “He’s retired, but he wants strangers to know he’s been with it.”

  “I see his point.”

  Soon Wanda joined me. She was in a full crisp white skirt and a black trim blouse. Her eyes and her smile were shiny in the dusk. She brought us two bowls of an ominous-looking stew and two bowls of salad. We took them out on the porch, away from the confusion, and sat in a band of light that came through one of the windows. The stew was superb; so was the salad. Later we joined some singing in foreign tongues, and I smiled in a strained way at jokes I couldn’t understand which sent powerful men into helpless falling-down laughter. At a little after eleven, a morose boy drove me in an old pickup back to my car. I finally found a vacancy in a rather dreary motel. There was a handsome blister on my heel.

  At eleven the next morning, when four of them came swinging down over the edge of the big safety net, Wanda walked over to me, scowling, and said, “How many meetings can you miss?”

  “I’ve got vacation time piled up that I didn’t use. My boss didn’t want me to take it now because we’re bringing out new products. I told him on the phone this morning that I have to take it now.”

  She put a big beach towel around her shoulders like a cape, and we strolled over and sat on a plank-and-sawhorse table in the shade.

  “So will you just be—around here?” she asked.

  “If nobody minds too much.”

  She looked at me with a tolerant amusement. “We leave in March for the season on the road, Paulfox. There is always work to do at this time. Without cheap labor the small circuses would die. Over there is the bunkhouse for single men. You would eat fine, you know. Maybe you are too important. No? I can ask then and see if it is all right with everybody.”

  I took the two weeks, and then I demanded a third week. Harry Fletcher was very sour about it, but he couldn’t afford to get too nasty. Other firms had been after me, and he knew it.

  I drove up to Tampa on a Monday morning. When I walked into his office I knew he had decided to be jolly. He’s a pasty little man with steel-wool hair and a lot of nervous mannerisms.

  “Paul!” he said. “You look absolutely marvelous! Got that weight back. Got a tan. My, my, my.”

  I sat by his desk and said, “I appreciate all you’ve done for me, Harry. I know I should give you more warning. But just as soon as you can line up a guy for my territory, I’ll spend a week taking him around and introducing, him.”

  All the cheer slid out of his face. He tugged his ear, shifted some pencils around, and said, “I get pressure coming down from the top and up from underneath. You can’t appreciate what it’s like. I can get into a serious hypertension situation. One thing I thought I could rely on. Loyalty!” He stared fiercely at me and then sighed with resignation. “So if I have to buy your loyalty, Paul, I can face that too. Tell me what you’ve been offered. We’ll match it.”

  “It isn’t like that, Harry.”

  “You’re taking another job, aren’t you?”

  “Sort of.”

  He began to tear a memo into strips. “What is this ‘sort of’?”

  “Harry, I’m joining a circus.”

  I saw him take it the way a good fighter takes a surprise right lead. He kept moving until his world came back into focus. “You’re making a mistake. An advance man for a show is more like press-agent work. It isn’t your kind of selling, Paul, believe me. You’re a repeat business salesman, not one-shot promotions.”

  “No, Harry. I’m unloading my Owen stock and I’m buying a concession. The man who owns it wants to get off the road. He says I can make out. He’ll go along for the first month and get me going right. He’s got arthritis.”

  “Have you lost your mind!”

  “I’m just going into business for myself.”

  He jumped up and began to pace. “What a business! Why don’t you get into buggy whips? How about the big new field that’s opening up making hoops for hoop skirts, kiddo? Circuses are in trouble! Haven’t you heard?”

  I’d had no intention of explaining it all to him. But he was very agitated and, according to his own lights, he’d been fair to me. “That’s why I’m doing this, Harry.”

  He sat down heavily and stared at me. “You’re suicidal. You need help.”

  “Harry, listen to me. Two years from now, five years from now or ten years from now, could I make a good living as a salesman?”

  “Yes. Any time. When you go broke, come back here.”

  “Harry, there is an old circus clan named Markava. They’ve been performers for generations. Now they have a twenty-year-old girl who might turn out to be the best they’ve ever had. But she has come along at the end of an era. The whole clan is proud of her. They want her to have the best possible life. Suppose she married another performer, and in three or four years there’s no more circus left. They’d be untrained for anything else. It might become a mean and squalid life for her, Harry.”

  “What’s this got to do with you?”

  “They’re a practical clan. They’ve been thinking about hedging their beautiful bet by finding her a civilian. She’d have no part of it until I happened along.”

  “And she fell madly in love with you?” Harry said with great sarcasm.

  “They’re practical people. She seems to like me. They have the old-world idea that you arrange a practical marriage, and then you fall in love afterward. I jumped the gun on that theory.”

  He shook his head sadly. “A circus girl! Holy Maroney! When does the marriage get arranged anyhow?”

  “We’ll go on the road. They’ve got to know if I can take that kind of a life. Some people can’t. If I can—and I can handle the concession—then we’ll get married, and they’ll set us up with our own deal, one of those house-trailer layouts on a flat-bed truck. It’s a truck show.”

  “Very romantic,” he
said. “Say, have you thought of this? If she’s real beautiful, it would be a slick way for them to unload sick concessions on suckers like you, Paul.”

  “I thought of that. Maybe they’re all kidding me. I don’t think so,”

  “You’ve got wonderful promise, Paul, and I hate to see you do this to your life. If the circuses don’t all fold, then you’re stuck in a nickle-dime operation all your life.”

  I couldn’t avoid a smile of contentment. “With no quotas, no sales meetings and no expense accounts.”

  “O.K., so what if it goes the other way? You get back into harness, and you’ve got a wife who won’t do you much good in a business-contact way.”

  “Harry, she has absolutely no interest in functional kitchens, gracious living or social standings. She says that if it turns out that way, she wants to raise horses and kids.”

  Harry had to make one last sly try. “Don’t those circus people have a kind of a loose moral way of living, boy?”

  “I’ve spent three weeks with them, Harry. I’ve been learning all about one of the lost arts. It’s called self-respect.”

  He found a man, and I broke him in, drew my final check and went back to Sarasota with all my worldly goods. The tempo of work was increasing. Wan was up to a comfortable three out of five on the triple. They never had any trouble thinking of things I could do.

  One day, a week before we left, I was out behind the house on a chilly afternoon, all by myself, unbolting rows of folding seats, painting them and repairing them, bolting them back together and stenciling the numbers back on.

  I didn’t know Wan was behind me until I heard her abrupt laugh. I stood up, straightening a weary back, and said, “What’s so hilarious?”

  She sat on a stack of seats and looked blandly at me. “I was thinking that we never had such a rich man working for us.”

  I put one foot up on the seats and looked down at her upturned face, “Does it give you a sense of power, Miss Markava?”

  “I don’t think I like that, Paulfox. Anything we do, it is because we are willing to do it. Because the reasons are good, don’t you think?”

  “I’m sorry. The reasons are very good. But—I don’t want you to feel trapped into anything.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “We have an arrangement. But if any time you should want to get out of it—”

  I was stopped by the expression on her face. It had turned into a stubborn mask of contempt, her eyes narrow, dangerous and oddly Oriental.

  “So sweet,” she purred. “So unselfish you are. So honorable. All I have to do is change my mind, eh, and you give me a nice little hurt smile and then perhaps we can shake hands or something like that?”

  Never have I felt such a quick hot bursting of rage within myself. Forgetting that even after all my manual labor she could very probably toss me up into a pine tree, I snatched her wrist and yanked her up onto her feet and dug my hands into her shoulders and shook her until her face blurred.

  “You can’t get out of it!” I yelled at her. “You made a deal! I sat up all one night yelling at all your weird relatives and drinking that plum brandy, and we made the arrangement, see? So don’t even think of trying to get out of it!”

  I was suddenly aware of her complete lack of resistance. I let go of her. She looked up at me with an odd half-smile, docile, respectful, but with a kind of pride and gladness showing through. “O.K., Paul,” she said. “O.K., sweetie.”

  I finished the folding seats in the late afternoon and went back to where they were practicing. I sat cross-legged on top of a gear box. Jenny brought me a cold beer. I lit my second cigarette of the day. I felt like a king as I watched her up there, my sweet sailing lady, my flying woman poised against the blue, blue sky, way up in the middle of the air.

  THE END