Shadow Dancers

by Herbert Lieberman

  “I knowed it was you, all right. Minute they said that thing about the nasty pictures on the walls, I said that’s Warren, all right.” She giggled to herself. “Always did have a taste for nasty pictures, you did. Even when you was a tyke. Used to like to go off by yourself with a pencil and pad and draw naughty things.” She winked at him slyly, then burst into peals of shrieking laughter.

  “Tell me, sonny, was it a profitable trip?”

  Warren Mars frowned and turned away. “It was okay.” The reply was curt and sullen, intended to terminate the conversation quickly. The abruptness of the response stopped the old lady momentarily.

  She’d been opening a can of soup and now she dumped its contents into a frying pan with a loud plopping sound. She pushed it around in there with a big wooden ladle. A sizable overflow spilled over the rim of the pan and sizzled on the burners. “You wouldn’t be keeping things from me, sonny, would you?” There was something of a taunt implied in the question. It came with a smile that opened on a mouth full of ruined, stumpy teeth.

  “I told you it was okay.”

  “Sure, sonny. Sure. Right you are. No need to bite old Suki’s head off.” Her eyes were full of playful mockery, but beneath that lay an edge of cool, shrewd assessment. “Whatcha so touchy for?”

  “Well, for Chrissake. I’m gone four weeks. The minute I’m home, right away you’re at me — prying into business doesn’t concern you.”

  She made a clucking sound with her tongue and pushed the soup around again. “Everything about my boy concerns me.”

  “You’ll get your share, don’t worry.”

  She giggled and stirred her soup. “Suki ain’t worried about her share, darlin’. She knows she’ll get her share.” She cocked an eyebrow in his direction. “Any nice little fancies you brung me home?”

  Something leaped in his eyes. A frown crossed his dark, brutal good looks and all at once he turned away. “What if I didn’t?”

  The row of stumpy, brownish teeth leered. “You’d never forget. Not your Suki. All she’s been to you.”

  He whirled and flung his hands at the ceiling. “Okay, okay. Just let’s quit it.”

  The soup bubbled and spattered in the frypan. It started to give off an unpleasant odor, like that of burning metal. She stared at the young man through the smoke of burning soup. He was standing there, half-turned away from her, hands plunged deep into his pockets.

  She moved toward him with an air of caution. When she stopped, it was directly before him, tiny beside him and looking up. “If I ask about things, it’s only ‘cause I love to hear how things are gettin’ on with my boy. You’re still Suki’s boy, ain’t you, darlin’?”

  She reached up tentatively and with a raw red paw cupped his chin in her palm. She patted it several times, each pat gaining momentum so that at the end they’d become short, hard slaps.

  “Radio’s full o’ you, sonny. You best keep your head down for a while now. They’ll be out lookin’ for you full force.” She grasped him hard at both elbows and shook him slightly. “You understand?”

  Annoyed, he looked away. She snatched his chin again and tugged his face around so that he looked down directly into her eyes. There was no longer any playfulness there. Only something rock hard and implacable. “You understand, do you?”

  “Get off my ass.”

  “Say it then. Say I understand.’”

  The annoyance deepened, along with the flush in his face. “I understand. Okay? I understand.”

  She giggled and pinched his cheek. “Good. Now what’d you bring home nice for poor old Suki?”

  He looked at her, shaking his head, weariness and despair scoring his features. “Time’s coming, old lady.” She waved him off with a laugh.

  “Soon. I’m telling you. You better believe it.”

  “Sure, sure. What’d you bring nice for Suki?”

  “Pretty soon. You’ll see. I’m going for good. I can’t say when, but it’ll be soon.”

  Laughing, she turned back to her soup, which was now sending up noxious vapors. “You’ve had a busy time, is what you’ve had. Your nerves are frazzled, is all. Come have a bite now. Suki hardly gets to see her boy no more.”

  She ladled out a scoop of the thick, gelatinous, lavalike substance from the frypan, splashed it into a cracked blue saucer, and thrust it at him. “There you go, little one. Eat up now.”

  After he’d left, she continued moving about the kitchen, shuffling over the cracked and faded linoleum, slippers slapping the bare floor behind her as she went about shifting the kettle on the burner and stirring a foul, evil-smelling pot of gizzards for the cats.

  Anyone using Grand Central on a daily basis would know Suki Klink at once. She was a fixture there. Especially in the winter. She was that old heap of rags you’d see plunked down in the middle of the treasury of junk she’d scavenged from trash bins. She’d lie there, propped up against the wall just outside the entrance to Track 28, directly opposite Zaro’s Bake Shop. Safely out of the drafts and cold. People from the offices in all the surrounding buildings would rush in and out of that bustling food emporium with bags of goodies, their fists crammed with change, and always slip her something. She was a canny old lady and chose her spots well.

  The house on Bridge Street she owned free and clear. It had been bequeathed to her by her husband, whom she married when she was fifteen. At that time Mr. Klink was hovering up somewhere about the sixty range. He died approximately seven years later and Suki had owned the place ever since. It was a sore point for the Amalgamated Mercantile Bank of New York, who owned everything else on the block and coveted the property with an eye toward erecting yet another sky-blocking monument to corporate majesty. Doubtless, another bank. Their lawyers had offered Suki pots of money to sell, alternately wheedling and coaxing, then threatening to have the place condemned and seized if she didn’t comply.

  If they thought they were dealing with a bewildered little old lady, she’d quickly disabused them of that notion. Suki was not greatly impressed with desk thumping and fulminations. She informed the bank through the good offices of her friend, a notary public and cigar-store owner, that she had no intention of selling the property at that time, least of all to them. The only way she’d be leaving number 14 Bridge Street was feet first in a coffin and she didn’t anticipate doing that for at least another twenty years. The notary public—Mr. Bloom was his name — then concluded by threatening a countersuit. For some reason plausible only to the arcane minds of bankers and lawyers, Amalgamated Mercantile backed off, at least for the time being, to regroup and rethink their strategy.

  Now listening to the slamming of doors and banging of windows overhead, Suki laughed softly to herself. It was one of his tantrums, which he’d often had, even as a small boy, venting his spleen on a variety of inanimate objects. He’d kick and punch and fling them across spaces with such force they’d puncture plaster and burst out windows. Then, as now, she knew that such fiery displays were made as much for her benefit as his; largely for effect and intended to inform her that she’d displeased him. She rattled pots and kettles in noisy defiance, sang out loud mock arias at the ceiling, and laughed merrily to herself.

  She’d heard it all before. How he was fed up and ready to clear out. How he hated the old place on Bridge Street. How it was a “goddamned pigpen,” smelling like a “shithouse,” with all those “fucking cats.” She listened to him stamp overhead and watched the shower of plaster dust drizzle slowly down through a fissure in the ceiling. From his eyrie high up in the cupola, he railed down at her against the old house, this fuming wreck that had been both sanctuary and prison cell to him since childhood.

  “Door’s open, sonny,” Suki would shout back at him cackling gleefully to herself and showing those yellow stumps of teeth. “All you’ve got to do is walk out.”

  The words were as much a taunt as they were an invitation. She could afford to be magnanimous. She knew he’d never go. Not now. Not anymore. But when he was a child
of six or seven and she’d brought him home and fed him soup, like some wild shivering thing plucked from a forest, then she couldn’t be so sure.

  In those days she made a point of never leaving him alone in the house. Then there was, indeed, the strong likelihood that if she had, he would bolt. So at night, after their late rounds at the terminal when they came home to Bridge Street and went to bed, she would lock him in the little room upstairs beneath the cupola. Weaning him, gradually, modifying his wild, wandering ways, she’d domesticated him from something untamed into a creature of home and hearth and conventional habits, until at last she felt she could leave him by himself in a house unlocked and trust that when she returned he’d still be there. When he got older he was free to come and go as he pleased. It was then she could begin to expect to see some return on her investment, for he was a talent, this one, her wicked little Sonny with the bright, sly smile. He could walk through the crowds in Grand Central and, with fingers light as air, lift wallets out of pockets and filch food and small change from countertops. She’d taught him all she knew of how to glean and gather the rich droppings of a wasteful, profligate society. She taught him the sort of skills that could make him free, a man of independent means who need never work for anyone in his life, to her mind the most contemptible state of existence imaginable.

  Now grown lanky and strong, he was a valuable prize. And she had fashioned him. She’d bred the nomadic street ways out of him so he’d remain by her side, an asset and a defense against a hostile world for the rest of her days. There was no danger now that he would ever leave.

  It was odd, she thought, that she understood this dependency, but that he didn’t, and doubtless never would. In his mind he was free. He’d lived wild as a child and he fully believed he could do so again.

  But, just as oddly, she failed to recognize her own dependency on him. Not financial dependency, for in that regard she needed no one. But in another more subtle yet far more potent way, life for her had become unimaginable without Warren. They’d been together the better part of fifteen years. He was the closest thing to blood to her, the only thing that might be looked upon as family since Mr. Klink’s untimely demise. Moreover, he was her sole heir, though he didn’t know that and she had no intention of telling him until it became absolutely necessary. There was a paper in an old cardboard shoebox buried under the mound of quilts atop her bed. It was a paper drawn up by her notary-public friend, the proprietor of the small cigar store on Pine Street. Based loosely on a standard form found in a Good Housekeeping magazine, it had been composed in language simulating a kind of quasi-legalese, waxing more and more flowery as the notary gained confidence, peppering the document with a dazzling array of wherefores and insofar ases and party of the first parts, and so on. And while the end result was ludicrous, as most such documents generally are, it would certainly pass in most probate courts. The concluding line designated Warren Mars in clear, unequivocal terms as “heir to all of my worldly possessions here and now and for the full term of all his mortal days.”

  That’s why the notion that he might actually go had to be taken seriously. Aside from the void it would leave — and that would be considerable — more disturbing even, there would be no one to whom she could leave her “collections” as well as the old house on Bridge Street. If that were actually to occur, then the bank and lawyer leeches, sensing her vulnerability, would come swarming about like jackals and hyenas at the scent of blood.

  More unsettling yet, she knew that if suspicious enough, or provoked, he could do her harm. She knew well his fits of towering rage, but she felt reasonably confident in her ability to control them — at least keep them in check. Regardless of how much he professed to hate the old, crumbling, derelict house, she assured herself that he needed it to come back to after the periodic orgies of self-indulgence and self-loathing.

  If things got too bad, if Warren were to become dangerously unmanageable, there was always the law. But in her heart of hearts, Suki knew she could never betray him in that fashion. She despised the legal establishment and all of its lackeys — the police who chased her out of the terminal on cold nights, and the judges and lawyers who even then conspired to swindle her out of all her “earthly possessions,” — too much to seriously contemplate such an action. She loved Warren (or whatever it was in Suki that passed for love) far too much ever to surrender him to the jackals and hyenas. If they ever got their hands on him, they would surely lock him away forever. They might possibly even kill him.

  On the radio that day she’d heard people clamoring for his head. Community groups were out on the streets, in front of City Hall with placards. The press was railing against the police, and neighborhood surveillance groups were threatening to take the law into their own hands. The “Shadow Dancer,” they called him. Suki laughed gleefully over that. Her boy a celebrity.

  * * *

  Upstairs in the little room beneath the cupola, Warren Mars continued to stamp and fling things and flail about. The floor was now fairly littered with a variety of debris, from this and earlier eruptions. It was odd, he thought, how whenever the old lady was around, he was angry. Angry and a bit scared. He couldn’t say precisely why, but it had been that way since childhood.

  He was, possibly, six or seven when she’d first taken him in. That was shortly after she’d found him in Grand Central. He was living down there in the dead of winter with a band of nomadic adolescents in the labyrinth of tunnels beneath the tracks. She found him there one night, shivering and feverish, and took him back with her to Bridge Street. The child was reluctant to go but too weak to protest.

  He hadn’t eaten in several days and so when she asked him, he went eagerly with her. Assuming that he’d remain with her a night or two, steal what he could when she wasn’t looking, then slip away, he complied with her wishes. It didn’t work out that way. Instead, it turned into a collaboration, a fifteen-year partnership, and a comfortable habit he was unable to break.

  Of his life before Suki plucked him from the terminal and brought him home to Bridge Street, Warren recalled little. He could not remember his parents except for a vague pang of distaste whenever the subject came up. He had some woozy recollection of a basement apartment far over in the West Forties where he seemed to think his father was the janitor. He couldn’t be certain about any of that since, beyond the age of six or seven, he spent little time there. What he recalled, in mostly broad, unspecific terms, was that the apartment was always crowded and dirty and there was never anything to eat.

  Once as a child he came home crying. The other kids had told him that his name wasn’t a real name since he had no real parents. Suki told him that she was his “parents” and that he had been named after a brave and powerful “god of war” whom everyone feared and that he must live up to that heroic heritage. After that he felt much better about his name.

  With Suki things improved one hundredfold. At least with her he ate regularly and slept in a bed, even if it was just a foul, licey mattress with malodorous, urine-stained ticking resting on the cold floor.

  As he grew older, Suki occasionally would toss him some pin money to put in his pocket. It was her way of tendering a bit of independence while still keeping the boy on a tight rein. He was still too young and too much of an innocent to realize that it was his own money she was giving him back — the small sums he’d panhandled, swiped from countertops, scrounged from telephone coin slots in the terminal and dutifully turned over to her. At the close of each “working day,” Suki would relieve him of all that, putting it on a lofty moral plane, however, by proclaiming that if he was ever to grow up and take his place in society, he had to learn to pay his fair share, meaning, no doubt, the cost of the exiguous bed and board she provided him on Bridge Street.

  In those early days, their routine was simple. Suki and Warren would sleep or sit around all day on Bridge Street. In late afternoon, they’d have a bite of supper and go up to the terminal, planning their arrival to coincide with the great h
omeward rush of commuters spilling out of all the surrounding offices.

  They would take up their position at the entrance of Track 28, Suki perched like some obscene carrion bird atop her many bags of trash, Warren sitting small and appealingly pathetic beside her. As an image of social displacement, it was irresistible. Poster-perfect. People seeing them would, of course, conclude they were homeless and that he was her child, although the disparity of their ages made that biologically unlikely. In no time, the battered hats and small tin cans they put out were filled with coins and bills of small denominations.

  When activity in the terminal would start to subside, they’d haul all of their baggage crosstown to the theater district and sit on the ground straddling the warm gratings, waiting for the intermissions and the shows to break. With all the people streaming from the theaters at eleven P.M., she would gently propel the boy forward out of the shadows where he’d been dozing. Waiflike and pathetic, he’d move through the well-heeled crowds, his small hand out, his eyes large and beseeching. Needless to say, they would give him change. A lot of change. It was easy.

  There were nights, particularly in spring and summer, they would work the streets till three A.M., then repair to the Night Owl Diner on 11th Avenue, where a lot of nocturnal folk, not unlike themselves, and having no better place to go, would gather for coffee and cake, and talk and laugh and smoke until dawn.

  Afterward Suki and the boy would grab the IND at 6th Avenue and take it down to Church Street. They never paid fare at that hour of the morning. They merely ducked the turnstile. The attendants in the change booths knew them and would never say a word.

  They’d be back on Bridge Street just as the sun was coming up over the Stock Exchange. Inside, they’d unload their bundles, take inventory of the night’s haul, and stash it in a safe place. They would then, like a pride of lions that had hunted all night, sleep for the rest of the day. At four P.M., they would rise again. Suki would prepare some small, makeshift supper and they would make ready to go back up to the terminal.