Night of the Juggler

Chapter 7

The kitten, purring, made its way slowly across the brown blanket of Gus Soltik’s bed, stopping occasionally to peer about alertly and cautiously at its new environment. Near Gus Soltik’s wrinkled and soiled pillow the kitten found a bit of food, a crumb of a doughnut with sugar on it. It sniffed at it, and while it licked at the grains of sugar, the door opened and Gus Soltik came in from the second-floor corridor with a saucer of milk in his big hands. He closed the door, locked it, and placed the dish of milk on the floor.

The room was close and warm, and there was an animal smell to it.

Gus Soltik removed his yellow cap and pulled off his brown sweater, and the light from the single overhead bulb gleamed yellow on Gus Soltik’s thick, wide shoulders, which were spotted with tiny clusters of pimples. He picked up the kitten, which as warm and soft in his great hands, and squeezed it gently, increasing the pressure till the little cat whimpered. “Not hurt,” he said, speaking slowly and quietly, and then he placed the kitten on the floor beside the saucer of milk.

The kitten caused words to form in Gus Soltik’s mind. “Cages” and “Lanny.” The kitten made him think of the “cages.” They roared and frightened people, but Gus Soltik knew in some fashion they were helpless. They were him. Like him. He could frighten, but he was helpless. It created an agony of bewilderment and confusion in his head when he saw clerks making the cash register ring, adding up numbers, changing the paper money into the hard, shiny money. He could lift crates from the floor that none of the others could, but they had to point to where they wanted him to put them down. He never knew.

“Lanny.” And food. Lanny had tried to explain to him about the animals that played the musical instruments around the clock. But he couldn’t understand the music and distrusted it. But Lanny talked quietly. Lanny worked in the big building near the zoo and the pond.

He liked Lanny, and once he had brought a sack of old food from the store. Green stuff and oranges and potatoes they put in the alley when the store closed. The food was for the cages. Gus Soltik wanted to do something for them because Lanny was good to him.

But Lanny explained, slowly and quietly, that only certain people could give food to the cages. He felt none of the helpless anger that was like a fire in him when such things happened. When he didn’t understand, Lanny talked slow and smiled, and it was different. .

And once, and this was their secret, Lanny had shown him how to start and drive the truck.

With the back of his hand, Gus Soltik massaged the welt in his low, round forehead which had been caused by the tight, restricting rim of his yellow leather cap. He spoke again to the kitten, saying, “Not hurt,” and smiled in an earnest and surprised fashion when the little animal began to lap at the milk with its darting pink tongue. It was a pretty cage, he thought, black with a white spot between its eyes.

“Not hurt,” he said again.

Gus Soltik’s voice was high and shrill, a ludicrous sound emerging from that massive corded throat, but the sounds he made were only high and straining when he was excited, and he was so excited now that his hands were trembling and there were blisters of sweat on his forehead and the backs of his hands.

It was time. He thought of a green skirt and white legs, and a mask of lust glazed his eyes and, like a muddy dye, deepened the raw red color in his cheeks.

Moving with strides uncommon to a man of his height and size, he went to his closet, where a battered airlines travel bag hung from a hook alongside his mother’s dress.

Unzippering the bag, Gus Soltik placed it on his bed, noting as he did that the kitten was continuing to drink the milk. He had found the bag one night in a trash can on Park Avenue near Fifty-seventh Street. The sides of the bag were frayed, and there were several rips in the stiff plastic fabric, but it had a strong zipper and a sturdy handle.

Gus Soltik glanced slowly around his meagerly furnished room to be absolutely certain that he remembered all his hiding places. Some things were there, he knew, allowing his glazed eyes to remain fixed on a chest of drawers. Another thing was in the shoebox on the table under a window which was covered by a faded green shade.

Suddenly he felt a stir of panic; it was as if a damp cloth had been rubbed with a powerful hand across his mind, completely erasing his memory of his last name.

“Gus. . Gus. .” he said, the words tense with his fears.

And with this sickening lapse, this dreadful loss of identity, came still another desperate realization; his mind was blank, and there was a roaring in his ears because he knew he not only had forgotten his last name but had forgotten the hiding places of the two most essential things. .

He couldn’t run downstairs to the mailbox and look for his name. Not without putting on his sweater and cap. Mrs. Schultz would shout at him and want to know why, but if he stood here, trembling like an animal trapped in a circle of fire, his despair might become so unendurable that he would be forced to pound his head against the wall until he lost consciousness.

Abruptly he was seized by a terrible thirst. He ran into his bathroom and opened the mirrored door of a tiny medicine cabinet, and while he reached for a plastic glass, his eye fell on an object partially hidden by a pair of empty cookie boxes. When he saw those glistening loops of steel, he almost sobbed with relief.

And at the same instant he was able to speak his own name clearly and confidently: “Gus Soltik.”

His thirst had gone. With sure, confident fingers, he lifted the handcuffs from behind the cookie boxes and returned to his bedroom and gently placed the linked steel wristlets into the tattered airlines bag. He had bought the handcuffs in a novelty shop on Forty-second Street, and while they were sold as toys, they would effectively manacle the thin wrists of a child.

Moving now with extreme care, determined to make no mistakes, there was a sense of both ritual and economy in the manner in which Gus Soltik opened the bureau drawer and lifted out three items which had been hidden under one of his shirts: a coil of slim nylon rope, a roll of wide adhesive tape, and a pipe lighter whose tiny metal jet could generate a three-inch surge of white-hot flame.

After carefully placing these objects in the airlines bag, he removed the lid from the shoebox and sifted through a clutter of torn-up newspapers until his fingers closed on the handle of his heavy hunting knife. Slipping the knife free from its sheath, he checked the edge of the razor-sharp blade with his thumb. As he returned the blade to its sheath and dropped the hunting knife into the airlines bag, there was a knock on the door, and Mrs. Schultz called to him from the corridor.

“Come on down to the kitchen, Gus.”

Not remembering whether or not he had locked the door, Gus moved with a speed spurred by terror, scooping up the cat and plunging it into the airlines bag.

“I got some coffee and doughnuts,” Mrs. Schultz said. “I got the jelly kind.”

Gus put the airlines bag in his closet and closed the door, and then, trembling with panic, he picked up the saucer of milk and ran into the bathroom, dumping the milk into the hand basin and rinsing it away with sluicings of tap water.

In the corridor of the old tenement, which creaked endlessly with the final settlings of time, Mrs. Schultz stood in front of Gus Soltik’s door, her normally placid and passive features darkened with an anxious frown.

She was a stout old woman with thick gray hair, which she wore knotted with a rubber band at the base of her neck. Balanced on the bridge of her bulbous nose were narrow steel-rimmed spectacles which did little to aid her rheumy old eyes. This didn’t concern her; she had no occasion to read anything these days and they were fine for yardwork and TV shows, and she liked the way they looked, bright and flinty on sunny days. She tried Gus’ door and found it locked and felt a stir of anxiety.

“What you doing, Gus?”

“Putting clothes.”

Mrs. Schultz noticed that his voice was high and shrill, which was bad.

It meant he was nervous. The best thing to do was just leave him alone, pay no attention. . That’s what Gus’ mother had told her, and who would know better than a boy’s own mother?

“It’s ready when you want it,” she said, and went back down the stairs and into the kitchen on the first floor of their silent old tenement.

Mrs. Schultz sat in the kitchen, waiting for the sound of Gus Soltik’s heavy footsteps on the stairs. The room was warm, and the rows of African violets she kept on the windowsills that overlooked the cluttered backyard charged the air with damp fragrance.

Mrs. Schultz felt sorry for Gus tonight because she knew he was in one of his troubled moods, but the emotion was not strange to her because she had spent most of the seventy-three years of her life feeling sorry for other people.

Her parents had brought her to New York from Germany when she was only a child, a dozen years before the First World War, and ever since, she had lived in New York in a succession of slums and tenements and ghettos. She never complained because her father and mother had told her she must be grateful because she lived in a free country.

Mrs. Schultz had made it her life’s work to help others. She brought soups to ailing women and collected clothing for ragamuffin children.

She tried to console the wives of the crazy Irishers, who drank from Saturday night until Monday morning and sometimes tore up their pay as if they hated the sight of it. The Irishers’ wives, the young ones anyway, were always the prettiest in the block, with their black or red hair and creamy skins and wild, frightened eyes. She brought sassafras tea and lemon cakes to the sorrowing Jewish women when they were having their cherished babies, and she hounded Sergeant Duffy to let the drunks out in time to get to their jobs.

Gus Soltik had no father that anyone knew anything about. His mother had rented a room from Mrs. Schultz almost twenty years ago, when Gus was a huge, awkward ten-year-old. They had lived in adjoining rooms on the second floor and were no trouble at all, except when Gus got into his queer moods, where he might lash out unexpectedly at anybody who happened to trigger his crazy temper.

That arrangement had ended one misting night about five years ago, when Mrs. Soltik had been struck and killed by an automobile at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. The driver, Maria Collins, a nineteen-year-old secretary, had been questioned and released by police. Mrs. Soltik, who was given to drink and strong language, had staggered from between two parked trucks directly into the path of Miss Collins’ car, and the girl testified there was no way in the world she could have avoided hitting the big woman.

After the accident Gus Soltik had hidden himself in the basement of the tenement for a week. He hadn’t gone to the church or the graveyard.

He wasn’t angry. That came later. He was frightened. He was afraid someone would come and take him away, now that he was alone.

Mrs. Schultz coaxed him back upstairs with a tray of rice pudding and hot milk flecked with cinnamon. She had a bouquet of flowers for him.

He didn’t know their names, but they were the colors of this time of year, yellows and reds like the leaves of the trees. They had been sent to the church by Maria Collins. With the flowers was a simple white card with Maria Collins’ name and address on it and a message written by hand which Mrs. Schultz read to Gus. “My sorrow and my prayers are with you today.”

Later Gus put the flowers and the little card in the closet on a shelf above his mother’s black dress.

It was a long time before the fear of being taken away left him. And then the almost unbearable anger began to grow. He looked at the card beside the withered flowers and saw the numbers. He made out the 6 and the 9 and he knew that was Sixty-ninth Street.

Gus Soltik found out where she lived, a basement apartment with two other girls. He went there nights and watched the lights in the apartment. But one night they were all dark and the shades were down. He climbed a wall behind the building and forced open a door.

The apartment was empty. There was no furniture. She was gone.

And he never found out where. He looked for her on the streets and on the sidewalks, but he never saw her again, and as the days grew colder and the first anniversary of his mother’s death drew near, Gus Soltik began looking for someone else.

In the five years since the accident Gus Soltik had lived alone with Mrs. Schultz. Mrs. Soltik, before her death, had once told Mrs. Schultz that because Gus wasn’t right in the head, there was no way he could “go” with girls. His great, hulking size and blemished complexion frightened them, and their fear roused a terrible frustration in him. He had hurt a girl on a school playground once, twisting her arm so hard and vengefully that he had dislocated her shoulder.

In an attempt to prevent any more of this kind of trouble, Mrs. Soltik had warned her son to keep away from girls. She had told him-driving the “facts” home in her grating, menacing voice-that girls carried razors and bottles of acid in their purses, and if he ever tried to bother them, even go near them, they would slash at him with the razors and throw the burning acid into his eyes. Then the police would blame him and arrest him and hurt him.

Mrs. Schultz did what she could for him. She wished he would go to church with her, but all she could do was make sure his clothes were clean and that he got enough food and the sweet things he liked, the cakes and cookies. But she couldn’t coax him into taking baths.

She heard his slow, heavy footsteps on the stairs and stood to pour him a cup of coffee.

In the narrow hall outside the kitchen, Gus put his bulging flight bag behind an old-fashioned hall tree and then went into the fragrant kitchen and sat down at the table with the old woman.

He was wearing his yellow leather cap, denim pants, Wellington boots, and the heavy brown turtleneck sweater.

“It was pretty,” she said. “All the incense and the candles and the singing. And three priests.”

It frightened him to think about it. His mother and the fires.

“Going out?” she asked him.

Gus Soltik stared at his steaming cup of coffee. “Walk.”

Mrs. Schultz knew it was risky to ask him questions when he was in one of his “moods” because it could cause him to erupt in emotional explosions; but she was worried about him, and in some profound, unquiet way, she knew in her old bones that it would be best if she knew where he was going to be that night. And so she risked a final question.

“You gonna see Lanny?”

He shook his head, and when he looked up from his coffee cup, she saw the angry glaze masking his eyes. “Walk,” he said again, but now his voice was rising in volume and intensity and his big hands held the edge of the table with a power that whitened his knuckles.

Just leave him alone, leave him alone. That was best, so the old woman muttered something about taking out the trash and went quickly and silently from the room in her worn felt slippers.

There were no words to describe-no words in Gus Soltik’s limited lexicon, that is-the great white void inside his head and the clamorous shapes of terror and excitement that filled the caverns of his mind with almost physically unbearable hungers and compulsions.

He thought of slim white arms and legs and the green fabric of a school uniform. “Greenropes.” With those images coiling hotly through his body, he stood so abruptly that his chair tipped over with a crash, but he was unaware of this, unaware of anything but his savage, growing needs.

Picking up the flight bag from behind the hall tree, Gus Soltik let himself out of the creaking old building and ran down stone steps to the sidewalk.

It was late afternoon, October 15, and the last thin rays of sunlight fell like a golden blessing over the dirt and refuse that littered the curbs and streets of this bitter and defeated city slum.