“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
