Kitten on a Trampoline

On a warm and bright and shining day of a brand-new year I was driving a company car from Naples, Florida, north to Tampa. I was slamming it through traffic, irritable and edgy. The back end was stowed with samples, literature and display materials. I’d kept myself in top gear for three years, ever since I’d been graduated from Florida State. I’d turned myself into the best road man the Owen Drug Company had ever seen. I was making twenty thousand a year. I was buying Owen stock with every dime I could hoard after taxes and bachelor living expenses. I’d won all kinds of awards by working ninety-hour weeks at a dead run. I was on my way to a brilliant career.

But I was chronically hoarse from giving my spiel to doctors and druggists, and I tried not to notice that I was going through three packs of cigarettes a day, or notice the persistent tremor in my hands or the deepening frown wrinkles between my brows. I hadn’t been sleeping well of late, and I was bothered by nervous indigestion. My weight was down, and my temper was too easily lost.

But you have to keep pushing and churning if you are going to get anywhere in this world.

I came roaring up Route 41 into the south end of Sarasota. I would have made the light by a big shopping center if a dawdling cluck in a quarter acre of Ohio Cadillac hadn’t drifted over into my lane and blocked me out of the play. I was running behind schedule, and so I sat, cursing him, holding my steering wheel so tightly my knuckles ached.

I happened to glance over toward a part of the big shopping-section parking lot which had been fenced off. A crowd of people were clustered with their backs toward the highway, watching something.

I saw a girl burst up into the air, higher than their heads. With her body straight out, she made a turn so slow and so elegant it seemed that I was watching it in slow motion, and then fell back out of sight and reappeared again in a slight variation of the first turn. I knew that the girl in the sunlight was the most astonishingly beautiful thing I had ever seen. I watched her until an indignant horn blatted behind me, and I saw the Ohio Cadillac so far ahead I knew the light had changed long ago.

I charged ahead, but somehow I couldn’t get back into the strain-and-scurry frame of mind. I suddenly had the horrible realization that I was close to breaking into tears. I now know it was a clue to the extent of my nervous exhaustion. Something so precious had occurred that I couldn’t even put a name to it. And here I was, running away from it. I drifted over to the curb, found a place to turn around and went back and parked, locked the car and joined the people.

It was one of those Trampoline layouts which are suddenly appearing all over the country. Seventy-five cents for thirty minutes of bouncing up and down. I had seen it being done, but not like this. Neither had the other people, I guess. Except for some squealing kids, the other customers inside the fence had stopped to watch her also, in a hypnotic silence. It was like a wild strange dance she was improvising as she went along, with a complete grace and total control in spite of the tremendous height she was achieving. She was young, she had a burnished tan and she was sweetly and strongly constructed. Her hair was a tousled brown-red mass. She wore a sleeveless yellow-print blouse and little chocolate-colored shorts. I could see her face clearly only at the apex of those leaps when she was turning slowly. It was one of those wide-cheeked Slavic faces of a totally deceptive placidity. She had a dreaming look, a contentment, a half smile. She drifted and spun in a better world than any of us could know.

Suddenly she smothered the next leap with a deft flex of brown knees and stepped off the Trampoline. We gave an audible group sigh because it was over, and then we all began clapping. She looked startled, but smiled with a professional brilliance, bowed with professional aplomb and bent to put her shoes back on as the applause died and the people began drifting away.

I moved toward the gate where she would come out. I heard the proprietor telling her to stop there at any time and be his guest. It was a smart business gambit for him. She came out, moving slowly, earthbound after soaring, carrying a yellow purse. She was sturdy and smaller than I would have guessed. But as she neared me I could detect none of the residual puffing and damp sweatiness of great athletic effort.

“There should have been music with that,” I told her. She gave me that single cool glance of dismissal all girls that pretty must learn. I walked beside her. She pretended I was not there.

“I have to tell you something,” I said. “I don’t loaf around bothering pretty girls. I was driving through. I had to stop for that light. Then I saw you over the heads of those people, way up in the middle of the air. I drove on because I’m supposed to be in Tampa by four o’clock for a sales meeting, but I found out I had to come back and find you and tell you how beautiful it was. That’s all.”

She stopped and looked up at me. “So you’ve told me. Now go to Tampa.” It was an urchin voice, unmannered and with a faraway spice of accent. She was affecting an elaborate boredom.

We were near a drugstore. “I could buy you a coffee or a soda.”

She shrugged. “I’m thirsty,” she said.

We went in and sat at the counter. She ordered limeade. I ordered coffee. I put my business card on the counter top.

“Paul Fox,” she read. “Short name.”

“I’m twenty-five. I’m not married. I cover the whole southern half of the state. I’m based in Tampa. I spend four days a month there. I drive fifty thousand miles a year.”

“Enchanting,” she said tonelessly.

“I had the ridiculous feeling you might tell me your name.”

“For one limeade? Why not? Wanda Markava.”

I looked at my watch. I spotted the phone booths. “Wanda, I have to make a phone call. Promise you won’t leave before I get back.”

“If you don’t get back before I feel like leaving, I won’t be here. How much do you expect out of one limeade?”

I called Harry Fletcher in Tampa and told him I was held up in Sarasota by car trouble, and I couldn’t make the meeting. He told me to pick up a rental car. I said it was tire trouble, and I’d wrenched my back changing the wheel and I didn’t feel like driving. He believed my every word. It was my first lapse from total dependability. I saw Wanda get off the stool and stroll toward the door. I cut Harry off by saying loudly, “Hello? Hello? Hello? Damn it!” and hanging up.

I caught up with her a hundred feet from the store. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Can I walk with you?”

“I don’t own the sidewalks. It’s a long way. You’ll miss your meeting.”

“I phoned Tampa and told them I would.”

“You’re wasting your time, Paul Fox.”

“Kindly let me be the judge of what is a waste of time and what isn’t.”

She gave me an oblique glance and said, “I have to go home to take care of my three babies and start cooking a big hot dinner for my husband.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. My heart rolled over and died. She walked on and turned back and looked at me curiously. Suddenly she threw her head back and gave a curiously abrupt bark of rather harsh laughter. “No husband. No babies. Come along. It was a good way to get rid of you, Paul Pest Fox, but you looked too sad. There’s a hundred other ways.”

We walked together in January sunlight. I stole careful glances at her. Only the most perfect physical conditioning can produce a walk like hers, as lithe and unself-conscious as a tan panther on a jungle path. There was a childish look about the blandness of forehead, the snubbed nose and the placid symmetry of her cheek. And there was a small-boy appeal in the squareness and sturdiness of her hands. But the impact of the total creature was vividly, uncompromisingly female.

She seemed placidly content with our silence, and I knew I would have to initiate any new topic. We were passing a suburban bank. “You were terrific on that Trampoline, Wanda. And you look so very trim. I was wondering if you… if you’re on some sort of gymnastic team.”

The bank lawn looked green and soft. Without breaking her stride she stepped off onto the grass and went into a series of three limber flip-flaps which ended with a complete front flip with a half turn so that she ended the series facing me. Again she gave that bark of laughter. “Gym team!” she said with complete derision. “Circus,” she said haughtily as she fell in step with me again.

I felt like thumping myself in the head. This was Sarasota. It explained some of the strangenesses of her. These were the most clannish people in the world. “Which circus?” I asked.

She seemed truly astonished. “With my name, which one would it be? Rossoni and Markava. It isn’t big, but we are known. I am a flier. You should know that too. I can do many things, but flying is best. I was on the rings when I was five years old.” She held her arm out. “Look at this arm! Tell me what you think of this arm, Paul Fox.”

We stopped and I looked at it carefully, wondering what I was supposed to be looking for. It was round, firm and brown, and gracefully proportioned. The skin texture was silken. I had the dizzy wish to kiss the hollow of the elbow. “It’s a lovely arm, Wanda.”

“Yes it is,” she said with a wonderfully innocent pride. “My mother, my grandmother, they are both the same. It is good luck for a woman to be this way. With either arm I can lift more than you can with two. But we Markava women get no ugly bulging muscles. With my uncle sitting on my shoulders, I can do very slow deep-knee bends. He weighs over two hundred. I weigh one hundred and eighteen. The muscles show a little bit more in the legs, but it is still not ugly, is it?” She moved away from me to pose for inspection and looked back over her shoulder at me with a rather anxious expression.

“They’re lovely legs, Wanda.”

“No. The arms are better, as arms. The legs are too short. I am just five feet two and a half, and I am too long in the waist to have a really good figure. If I were five feet six, the legs would be just right, with the same length from the hips up. I’d look better when I fly. But I might not be so strong. Here. Press with your knuckle here, against the calf.” I saw her tense her leg. It became like sleek brown marble. A passing tourist boggled at us and nearly ran up over the curbing.

We walked on. I searched my memory for a properly circusy question and finally dredged one up. “Can you do the triple?” I asked politely.

“Out of the last hundred practice tries, I got forty-one. When I can get to sixty out of a hundred, we’ll put it in, Uncle Charley says. He’s my catcher on the triple. After we practice, our hands are so swollen we have to soak them.”

I had run out of questions. It seemed to me we had walked a very long distance. I could feel a blister beginning to form on my right heel.

“You smoke too much,” she said abruptly.

“I know I do.”

“So why don’t you smoke less?”

“There’s a lot of strain connected with my job, Wanda.”

“Strain? Selling pills?” she asked with such surprise that it irritated me.

“They set a quota for me, and I have to meet it.”

“So what happens when you meet it? The strain is over?”

“Well, no. They set a new quota.”

She snorted and said, “Even in the seal act, a seal always gets a fish after every trick. They don’t make her work harder each time for the fish. That quota thing is ridiculous.”

I thought about it, and I saw that it was. I was being treated with less dignity than a seal. But I had to salvage something. “I make darn good money.”

“How much?” she demanded.

“Uh — twenty thousand dollars.”

“What do you spend it all on?”

“Taxes take a big bite because I’m single. After I pay living expenses, I invest what’s left in stock in the company I work for.”

“Ha.”

“What’s this ha?”

“Nothing. It just sounds like a crummy way to live, Paul Fox.”

“I’m considered very successful for my age.”

“Ha,” she said again, and I didn’t feel like contesting that one. I didn’t know what she was calling me in her mind. A townie, perhaps. Or a mark. It was an odd experience to be scorned and pitied by this delicious little flier.

“We turn here,” she said. “Five more blocks. Are you sick?”

The question startled me. “Why do you ask me that?”

“You are pale, and I saw your hand shaking when you picked up your coffee cup. You look thin and stringy, and when somebody squealed their brakes a little while ago you went right up in the air.”

“I don’t get a chance to get much sun, Wanda. I’ve been working hard without a break for a long time. No, I’m not sick.”

“You don’t look healthy.”

“Compared to you I’ve never been healthy, I guess.”

“You look older than twenty-five.”

“I like what you do for my morale, friend.”

“I’m not doing it. You’ve been doing it to yourself — for that twenty thousand dollars.”

“You don’t mind saying exactly what you think, do you?”

“I wouldn’t say it if you really were sick.”

So I used up a couple of blocks of silence thinking that over. I was scowling at the sidewalk when she said, “Here it is.”

The paving and sidewalks and small, careful houses ended. The Markava domain was beyond the end of the street, and it seemed to have been spilled across several scrubby acres. I stood and looked at the cars parked at complete random, at several house trailers and at haphazard sheds and outbuildings. The original house had been a cottage. It looked as if it had been enlarged through a dreamy process of buying abandoned garages and affixing them to the house and to each other in the quickest possible manner. There was a big new front porch of raw wood across the front of it. I looked at all the kids racing around.

“Is there a party going on?”

“Oh, no. It’s mostly all family. But there are people always coming and going. Come on.”

The children ignored us. As we went up onto the porch, a huge man pushed the screen door open and came out. “Charley, this is Paulfox,” she said, turning me into one word.

“Hahya,” he said to me. “Go change and we’ll work some, Wan.”

“You could watch,” she said to me and went into the house. Charley was eating some sort of stew out of a yellow bowl with his fingers. He looked like a television version of a Siberian bandit. He was bare to the waist, and his magnificently-muscled torso was hairless. After each chunk of stew meat he would lick his thumb and finger and then wipe them on a dish towel tucked into the waistband of his baggy trousers. He looked at me with distant amusement.

“That Wanda,” he said finally. “I wanted to build up an army, know what I’d do? Send her out six or ten times a day. Make a big circle. Come back here. One guy following every time. Clunk his head and swear him in. Sure. She talks to you, though. You’re ahead. One guy in twenty she even says hello. The others just follow. A big one last week got out of line. Fritz was here. He’s only so big, and maybe he’s sixty, who can tell? Does a wire act. The big guy got on Fritz’s nerves. He bent down, picked up the guy’s right foot and put it behind the big guy’s right ear. After he found out he could walk, he didn’t stay long.”

Wanda came out in a faded gray-blue leotard. Charley put his bowl down on the porch floor and stepped out of his pants. He was wearing patched maroon tights. I followed them around the house. The big practice rigging was there with the safety net slung in position. All the chrome was shiny, and the whites were very white. Such flying rigs look smaller outdoors. I learned one thing the Markavas weren’t casual about. Charley and Wanda went to work, and they checked every line, every guy wire and every fastening — patiently, thoroughly and without haste. Then they went up hand over hand to opposite platforms and used the lead strings to pull their traps up to their platforms. Several persons had appeared from nowhere to watch. I didn’t know then that a couple of the men had positioned themselves in the only places where there was any chance she might miss the net on a partial catch and a slip.

Charley swung out and built the swing higher with two hard strokes, then settled himself into the leg-twined upside-down posture of the catcher and established a stately, predictable rhythm. Charley started the count for her. She swung out and high. At the apex of her second swing she released the trap and did a full slow layout and seemed to float into the catch. All four hands catch wrists. They caught with an audible smack. It was so beautiful I wanted to hear 10,000 persons applauding. I watched several more catches.

“You that Paulfox, hah?” a heavily accented female voice said at my elbow.

I looked down into the leathery face of a stocky woman with bright yellow hair. She wore black denim pants and a sweat shirt that was stenciled with the curious legend, SARASOTA JUNGLE GARDENS. She stared at me with great intensity and repeated her question.

“Yes, that’s my name.”

“I’m her mamma, Jenny Markava.”

“How do you do?”

“I was top flier one time. Sixteen years. Longer than you tink, hah? Was damn good. But not so good as her. You watch. Wan has special ting. How you say? Floating. A slowness, like a magic. Hang in air. Nijinsky had. In ballet is called ballon, hah? A jeté lasting like forever. She is one of the great ones.” Her mouth twisted into a curious smirk. “But you tink is foolish nonsense, jumping around in the air, hah? Somebody gets hurt, hah?”

I looked up to see Wanda rise high in a blurred spin and, just as she started to fall, snap open for the wrist smack of the precision catch.

I turned back to Jenny Markava. “It is one of the most beautiful things in the world,” I said. “Anything that beautiful is very important, Mrs. Markava. It could never be nonsense.”

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 comer. 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.