Эд Макбейн: Running From Legs and Other Stories

“Look, my friend,” I said, “I am earnestly sorry there is no opening for you, but...”

“Why not watch me a little?”

“I am too busy.”

“It’ll take five minutes. Your big top is still standing. Just watch me up there for a few minutes, that’s all.”

“My friend, what would be the point? I already have...”

“You can take your books with you, Mr. Mullins; you won’t be sorry.”

I looked at him again, and he stared at me levelly, and he had a deep, almost blazing, way of staring that made me believe I would really not be sorry if I watched him perform. Besides, I could take the books with me.

“All right,” I said, “but we’re only wasting each other’s time.”

“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he answered.

We went outside, and sure enough the big top was still standing, so I bawled out Warren for being so slow to get a show on the road, and then this Angeli and I went inside, and he looked up at the trapeze, and I very sarcastically said, “Is that high enough for you?”

He shrugged and looked up and said, “I’ve been higher, my friend. Much higher.” He dropped his eyes to the ground then, and I saw that the net had already been taken up.

“This exhibition will have to be postponed,” I informed him. “There is no net.”

“I don’t need a net,” he answered.

“No?”

“No.”

“Do you plan on breaking your neck under one of my tops? I am warning you that my insurance doesn’t cover...”

“I won’t break my neck,” Angeli said. “Sit down.”

I shrugged and sat down, thinking it was his neck and not mine, and hoping Dr. Lipsky was not drunk as usual. I opened the books on my lap and got to work, and he walked across the tent and started climbing up to the trapeze. I got involved with the figures, and finally he yelled, “Okay, you ready?”

“I’m ready,” I said.

I looked up to where he was sitting on one trapeze, holding the bar of the other trapeze in his big hands.

“Here’s the idea,” he yelled down. He had to yell because he was a good hundred feet in the air. “I’ll set the second trapeze swinging, and then I’ll put the one I’m on in motion. Then I’ll jump from one trapeze to the other one. Understand?”

“I understand,” I yelled back. I’m a quiet man by nature, and I have never liked yelling. Besides, he was about to do a very elementary trapeze routine, so there was nothing to get excited and yelling about.

He pushed out the second trapeze, and it swung away out in a nice clean arc, and then it came back and he shoved it out again and it went out farther and higher this time. He set his own trapeze in motion then, and both trapezes went swinging up there, back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher. He stood up on the bar and watched the second trapeze, timing himself, and then he shouted down, “I’ll do a somersault to make it interesting.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Here I go,” he said.

His trapeze came back and started forward, and the second trapeze reached the end of its arc and started back, and I saw him bend a little from the knees, calculating his timing, and then he leaped off, and his head ducked under, and he went into the somersault.

He did a nice clean roll, and then he stretched out his hands for the bar of the second trapeze, but the bar was nowhere near him. His fingers closed on air, and my eyes popped wide open as he sailed past the trapeze and then started a nose dive for the ground.

I jumped to my feet with my mouth open, remembering there was no net under him, and thinking of the mess he was going to make all over my tent. I watched him falling like a stone, and then I closed my eyes as he came closer to the ground. I clenched my fists and waited for the crash, and then the crash came, and there was a deathly silence in the tent afterward. I sighed and opened my eyes.

Sam Angeli got up and casually brushed the sawdust from his clothes. “How’d you like it?” he asked.

I stood stiff as a board and stared at him.

“How’d you like it?” he repeated.

“Dr. Lipsky!” I shouted. “Doc, come quick!”

“No need for a doctor,” Angeli said, smiling and walking over to me. “How’d you like the fall?”

“The... the fall?”

“The fall,” Angeli said, smiling. “Looked like the real McCoy, didn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you don’t think I missed that bar accidentally, do you? I mean, after all, that’s a kid stunt.”

“You fell on purpose?” I kept staring at him, but all his bones seemed to be in the right places, and there was no blood on him anywhere.

“Sure,” he said. “My specialty. I figured it all out, Mr. Mullins. Do you know why people like to watch trapeze acts? Not because there’s any skill or art attached. Oh, no.” He smiled, and his eyes glowed, and I watched him, still amazed. “They like to watch because they are inherently evil, Mr. Mullins. They watch because they think that fool up there is going to fall and break his neck, and they want to be around when he does it.” Angeli nodded. “So I figured it all out.”

“You did?”

“I did. I figured if the customers wanted to see me fall, then I would fall. So I practiced falling.”

“You did?”

“I did. First I fell out of bed, and then I fell from a first-story window, and then I fell off the roof. And then I took my biggest fall, the fall that... but I’m boring you. The point is, I can fall from anyplace now. In fact, that trapeze of yours is rather low.”

“Rather low,” I repeated softly.

“Yes.”

“What’s up?” Dr. Lipsky shouted, rushing into the tent, his shirttails trailing. “What happened, Moon?”

“Nothing,” I said, wagging my head. “Nothing, Doc.”

“Then why’d you...?”

“I wanted to tell you,” I said slowly, “that I’ve just hired a new trapeze artist.”

“Huh?” Dr. Lipsky said, drunk as usual.

We rolled on to the next town, and I introduced Angeli to my other trapeze artists: Sue Ellen, Farnings, and Edward the Great. I was a younger man at that time, and I have always had an eye for good legs in tights, and Sue Ellen had them all right. She also had blond hair and big blue eyes, and when I introduced her to Angeli those eyes went all over him, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t made a mistake hiring him. I told them I wanted Angeli to have exclusive use of the tent that afternoon, and all afternoon I sat and watched him while he jumped for trapezes and missed and went flying down on his nose or his head or his back or whatever he landed on. I kept watching him when he landed, but the sawdust always came up around him like a big cloud, and I never could see what he did inside that cloud. All I know is that he got up every time, and he brushed himself off, and each time I went over to him and expected to find a hundred broken bones and maybe a fractured skull, but each time he just stood up with that handsome smile on his face as if he hadn’t just fallen from away up there.

“This is amazing,” I told him. “This is almost supernatural!”

“I know,” he said.

“We’ll start you tonight,” I said, getting excited about it now. “Can you start tonight?”

“I can start any time,” he said.

“Sam Angeli,” I announced, spreading my hand across the air as if I were spelling it out in lights. “Sam An—” I paused and let my hand drop. “That’s terrible,” I said.

“I know,” Angeli answered. “But I figured that out, too.”

“What?”

“A name for me. I figured this all out.”

“And what’s the name?” I asked.

“The Fallen Angel,” he said.

There wasn’t much of a crowd that night. Sue Ellen, Farnings, and Edward the Great went up there and did their routines, but they were playing to cold fish, and you could have put all the applause they got into a sardine can. Except mine. Whenever I saw Sue Ellen, I clapped my heart out, and I never cared what the crowd was doing. I went out after Edward the Great wound up his act, and I said, “Ladeeeees and Gentulmennnn, it gives me great pleasure to introduce at this time, in his American premiere, for the first time in this country, the Fallen Angel!”