“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!”
I don’t know what I expected, but no one so much as batted an eyelid.
“You will note,” I said, “that the nets are now being removed from beneath the trapezes, and that the trapezes are being raised to the uppermost portion of the tent. The Fallen Angel will perform at a height of one-hundred-and-fifty-feet above the ground, without benefit of a net, performing his death-defying feats of skill for your satisfaction.” The crowd murmured a little, but you could see they still weren’t very excited about it all.
“And now,” I shouted, “the Fallen Angel!”
Angeli came into the ring, long and thin, muscular in his red tights, the sequins shining so that they could almost blind you. He began climbing up to the bars, and everyone watched him, a little bored by now with all these trapeze acts. Angeli hopped aboard and then worked out a little, swinging to and fro, leaping from one trapeze to another, doing a few difficult stunts. He looked down to the band then, and Charlie started a roll on the drums, and I shouted into my megaphone, “And now, a blood-chilling, spine-tingling double somersault from one moving trapeze to another at one hundred and fifty feet above the ground — without a net!”
The crowd leaned forward a little, the way they always will when a snare drum starts rolling, and Angeli set the bars in motion, and then he tensed, with all the spotlights on him. The drum kept going, and then Angeli leaped into space, and he rolled over once, twice, and then his arms came out straight for the bar, and his hands clutched nothing, and he started to fall.
A woman screamed, and then they all were on their feet, a shocked roar leaping from four hundred throats all together. Angeli dropped and dropped and dropped, and women covered their eyes and screamed, and brave men turned away, and then he hit the sawdust, and the cloud rolled up around him, and an Ohhhhhhh went up from the crowd. They kept standing, shocked, silent, like a bunch of pallbearers.
Then suddenly, casually, the Fallen Angel got to his feet and brushed off his red-sequined costume. He turned to the crowd and smiled a big, happy smile, and then he turned to face the other half of the tent, smiling again, extending his arms and hands to his public, almost as if he were silently saying, “My children! My nice children!”
The crowd cheered and whistled and shouted and stamped. Sue Ellen, standing next to me, sighed and said, “Tony, he’s wonderful,” and I heard her, and I heard the yells of “Encore!” out there, but I didn’t bring Angeli out again that night. I tucked him away and then waited for the landslide.
The landslide came the next night. We were playing in a small town, but I think everyone who could walk turned out for the show. They fidgeted through all the acts, crowding the tent, standing in the back, shoving and pushing. They were bored when my aerial artists went on, but the boredom was good because they were all waiting for the Fallen Angel, all waiting to see if the reports about him were true.
When I introduced him, there was no applause. There was only an awful hush. Angeli came out and climbed up to the bars and then began doing his tricks again, and everyone waited, having heard that he took his fall during the double somersault.
But Angeli was a supreme showman, and he realized that the value of his trick lay in its surprise element. So he didn’t wait for the double somersault this time. He simply swung out one trapeze and then made a leap for it, right in the middle of his other routine stunts, only this time he missed, and down he dropped with the crowd screaming to its feet.
A lot of people missed the fall, and that was the idea, because those same people came back the next night, and Angeli never did it the same way twice. He’d fall in the middle of his act, or at the end, or once he fell the first time he jumped for the trapeze. Another time he didn’t fall at all during the act, and then, as he was coming down the ladder, he missed a rung and down he came, and the crowd screamed.
And Angeli would come to me after each performance and his eyes would glow, and he’d say, “Did you hear them, Tony? They want me to fall, they want me to break my neck!”
And maybe they did. Or maybe they were just very happy to see him get up after he fell, safe and sound. Whatever it was, it was wonderful. Business was booming, and I began thinking of getting some new tops, and maybe a wild-animal act. I boosted everybody’s salary, and I began taking a larger cut myself, and I was finally ready to ask Sue Ellen something I’d wanted to ask her for a long, long time. And Sam Angeli had made it all possible. I spoke to her alone one night, over by the stakes where the elephants were tied.
“Sue Ellen,” I said, “there’s something that’s been on my mind for a long time now.”
“What is it, Tony?” she said.
“Well, I’m just a small-time circus man, and I never had much money, you know, and so I never had the right. But things have picked up considerably, and...”
“Don’t, Tony,” she said.
I opened my eyes wide. “I beg your pardon, Sue Ellen?”
“Don’t ask me. Maybe it could have been, and maybe it couldn’t. But no more now, Tony. Not since I met Sam. He’s everything I want, Tony; can you understand that?”