Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (16 page)

As for my family, they had their own affairs to attend to. Out of sight, it was safe to assume, I was out of their minds. That
they
might be out of their minds was another subject, though even the casual observer couldn't help noticing that the Kaplan household seemed to have entered a state of decline.

More cantankerous than ever, Grandpa Isador had stepped up his campaign of waylaying homeless yokels in Market Square Park. To their greater confusion he regaled them about the false messiah of Germany and his latest crimes against the Jews. Recent evidence had revealed that they were being dispatched by the boatload for ports that everywhere denied them entry; the seas were littered with a second diaspora of wandering Jewish ships, condemned to sail for all eternity without hope of landfall. Meanwhile you'd have thought that my papa maybe subscribed to such wild disclosures, that he bought them the way he bought the bogus merchandise filling his shelves, because he dug himself ever deeper into the burrow of his shop.

In her virtual abandonment my mama turned to the rock of Uncle Morris. It was to him she petitioned for help in her efforts to have old Isador put away. Of the various available bughouse institutions, she was leaning, for reasons of convenience and economy, toward the Western State Asylum at Bolivar. This was a place where, according to my father, the inmates were frequently murdered, after first being made to sign over their earthly holdings to the asylum. The dead were then ground into meal and force-fed to the living, chained to their racklike beds—or so it was rumored. My uncle, whose blowsy waistcoat and roving smokestack cigar were now fixtures around the apartment, assured Mama that he was checking out the possibilities. And lately, cruising around in the afternoons in his cucumber-green touring car, my mama and Uncle Morris had begun to check out the possibilities together.

In the midst of all this I was as happily neglected as Grandma Zippe behind the chicken-wire cage. With the habit of making lists that I owed to my apprenticeship at Kaplan's, I took an inventory. Item: my family had certain notable screws loose, which who could deny. Item: the streets were awash with a multitude of ghostly strangers, among whom my grandfather conducted a tireless search for righteous men. Item: on top of which, the city had run riot with growing things—blue morning glories, yellow japonica, pink dogwood, wisteria seeping like purple sap from anything standing still. Was it any wonder that with so much going on in the way of distraction, nobody noticed that Harry Kaplan had begun to lead a double life?

If Papa no longer seemed to remember why he'd invited me to come and work in his shop, then I could forget just as easily. What's more, I'd become impatient with my papa's indifference to what were clearly disreputable goings-on. What else could you conclude when you saw Oboy repeatedly give up his post to confer with questionable characters on the street? Characters with eyes that ticked like windshield wipers and black sandpaper jaws, whom I'd heard him direct to the loading dock in back. While I couldn't quite believe that my papa was in cahoots with the puller, neither could I believe he was entirely innocent of what went on under his nose.

Weaned from any lingering sense of duty to the pawnshop, I nevertheless continued to stick around. Write it down to force of habit, though the shop still remained a good vantage from which to keep your eye on the hijinks in the lagoon. There was also the matter of my weekly salary, which, even if it amounted to little more than carfare, was certainly better than nothing at all. In the meantime, though he didn't ask and I didn't offer my assistance in taking stock anymore, I was there if Papa needed to send me out on errands. I didn't mind going if he didn't mind my sometimes taking roundabout routes to get there; it was a way to kill time in the afternoons. And late at night, two, three, sometimes four nights a week, I escaped out my alcove window.

I liked the secret disgrace of running with shvartzers, of having forbidden friends, if that's what you want to call them. Of course I didn't really include the dummy Michael, who'd been thrown into the bargain, like it or not. Nor did I believe for an instant Lucifer's ridiculous claim that his sullen shadow had a passion for reading books. Tell me another. With his hunched-over shoulders and his slouching gait, the slow shifting of his hooded eyes, Michael might have auditioned for Oboy's understudy. But where the stationary puller was sometimes given to fits of bustling animation, Michael was always the same steady goon. He was his brother's dim creature, good for nothing but following orders and keeping unobtrusively out of the way. And if Lucifer sometimes deferred to him, asking advice that was never given, this was only out of playfulness, the way you'd talk to a pet. Nor was I fooled by a brightness that occasionally invaded the dummy's eye, like a light switched on and off in a deserted house.

But that Lucifer, he was another story. For a while he'd continued to make out that our relationship was purely in the nature of a business arrangement. He'd been quick, for instance, to let me know when my forty-five cents' worth of rubbernecking was all used up. Then it had been time to renegotiate. It was “Gimme a nickel an I takes you backstage at the Midnight Ramble. Nother nickel, it a get you a peek at the Vampin Baby dressin' room. Sniff they hangin-up costume do you like.” But even though he persisted in addressing me by the formal “Mistah Harry,” somewhere along the line he dropped the pretense of free enterprise.

It could have been that he was simply getting used to having me in tow, since what was one more straggler at his heels to Lucifer? Or it could have been that—somewhere between helping him hide a fugitive from the Parchman Farm and carrying orders from the bootlegger under Pee Wee's Saloon—I'd passed muster. Whatever the case, the last time or two that I'd tried to compensate him for my tour of the underworld, the wise guy had taken offense. He'd swelled up like God forbid there should be a mercenary bone in his body. Then he'd relaxed into one of his sphinxier grins. “Maybe sometime y'all can return I an Michael the favor,” he suggested dreamily, as if he hadn't quite decided what it should be.

I'm the first to admit that, outside my acquaintance with the heroes of books, I'd had little enough experience in making friends. But while I had nothing to compare this with, I decided that what could it hurt if I considered myself and the colored kid to be pals.

There came a night when Lucifer said that the famous Beale Street could get along without us for a spell. “What I'm have in mind are a change a scene,” he'd asserted, pausing in the middle of Fourth Street to lick his finger and test the wind. This was an interesting prospect. To tell the truth, I'd been feeling that I'd seen what there was to see between the honky-tonks and social clubs and fleabag hotels of the neighborhood. Now I was curious to learn just how far the wise guy's sphere of influence extended.

We “borried” (a word I had lately come to interpret pretty loosely) an unattended skiff and rowed across the lagoon to the mercantile end of the street. It was my first ferry ride with the twins since the night of our original encounter, and I took the occasion to reflect on all that had happened, how far I'd come from the confirmed bookworm of old. I guess you could say I was proud of myself, proud to the point of entertaining delusions: I was this white hunter returning from an exotic port with human trophies. It was a notion that gave me a secret thrill—that is, until we beached the skiff and I was suddenly beset by misgivings.

After all, it was one thing to hobnob with Negroes on their own side of the fence; it was fine to play at being chums beyond the reach of prying eyes and all that. But it was quite another kettle of tsimmes to be caught in their company at my father's end of Beale. You might even call it grounds for scandal. And here I was in full view of the pawnshops whose gossipy brokers knew me well.

“Listen, Lucifer…” I was already starting to hedge as I climbed out of the boat, looking for some graceful way to take a powder. But the wise guy was ahead of me, as usual. He'd darted off, trailed by his brother, shagging it around a corner into the alley that ran behind the shops. When I caught up with them, he was lamenting to Michael, “I don't b'lieve Mistah Harry think we knows how to be pre-cautious.” I was as grateful as I was ashamed.

Then we were scuffling past the battered tin back door of Kaplan's Loans, stepless above a wooden dock fitted out with tire treads. Somewhere behind the door my papa would be laboring over his books while marauding youths prowled the alleys, and frustrated customers, blockaded by his surplus merchandise, were taking their business elsewhere.

“That's my papa Mr. Solly's place of business,” I announced, wondering if I could've gotten away with saying “famous.” “As you know, he's got a thing for junk, my papa. Got all kinds of shmutz in there, piled to the ceiling. It's jumbled in the aisles so you can't hardly…”

“Got a moon rock,” broke in Lucifer with solemn authority. “Got a stack a ol shin-plaster money, which it a turn to dust do you breave on it, an a suit made out a tobacca leaf. Got the Six Book a Moses and a feverroot coction make yo johnson stand up an say howdy. Got a angel skeleton with wangs an I disremember what all else.”

I didn't know whether he was taking the words out of my mouth or putting them in. But it excited me to hear him reciting the contents of my father's shop, like it was another of those places on the far side of the water he was always telling whoppers about. It made me feel all of a sudden that I never wanted to set foot in the pawnshop again, lest I find out it was only full of junk.

It wasn't until we'd wound our way down to the swamped foot of Beale Street—scrambling up an embankment onto the Illinois Central trestle and looking out over the immeasurably glutted expanse of the river—that I thought to ask where we were going. It was a question that brought Lucifer to a sudden, thoughtful standstill, as ditto his brother, who could stop on a dime.

“Where we goin?” Lucifer echoed vaguely, as if it had taken my asking to prompt the consideration. He reached under his cap and began to rub his scalp like this would maybe reveal the future. Then he turned toward his brother as he so often did. “Michael, whooch way you feature we be goin?”

Barely lifting his finger, Michael pointed down the tracks in the direction we'd been headed in the first place. But judging from Lucifer's reaction, you'd have thought that the dummy's gesture was somehow fateful. It was a characteristic of Michael's gestures that in their stingy economy they all seemed fateful. Nevertheless, the wise guy nodded slowly as the wisdom began to sink in.

“Izzackly,” he confirmed. When I couldn't help rolling my eyes over such a charade, Lucifer told me, like I should have some respect, “That am the direction toward yonder time ago.”

We kicked along the bed of the railroad, stepping from tie to tie with Lucifer in the lead, playing the fool. He was pretending to lay track out ahead of us, lifting his knees in what he called his gandy dance, wielding an imaginary sledge. “O de black gal she piss in de coffee,” he chanted, shouting “Hunh!” with every stroke of his hammer. “O de black gal she piss in the tea, hunh!” I was so spellbound by his antics that he caught me off guard when he stopped, and I stumbled into the backs of the twins like a heedless caboose.

“There she be,” proclaimed Lucifer with his typical gift for obscurity, “the onliest way to travel.” Then he stepped off the gravel skirt into the shaggy grass that lapped the top of the bluff.

I still wasn't sure what we were supposed to be looking at. Not until Lucifer had waded into the brush and taken hold of it was I able to make out an antiquated hunk of machinery. It was one of those relics that had so far outworn its usefulness that you took it for just another feature of the landscape. It was only after the wise guy had torn away some of the kudzu and scrub, shedding a little more starlight on the subject, that I could tell what it had been: an old railroad handcar turned over on its side.

With his brother's grim assistance, Lucifer set about freeing the thing from its leafy restraints. They rocked it back and forth, he and Michael, a little farther with every exertion, until the handcar eventually began to topple toward them. There was a sickening sound of deracination as the vehicle wrenched itself clear of the vines, then a thousand grasshoppers scattered along with the twins, making room for the machine to land upright in the shuddering dirt.

I stepped down from the tracks with a sigh and pitched in, though what was the point? The point was that I should show how I was solidly with them even in folly—what else could you call this business of trying to salvage such a heap of corrosion? The planks were splintered and encrusted with the earthworks of dirt daubers and fire ants. Its mechanical parts were caked in grease so ancient it was turning to moss. None of which prevented Lucifer, shouting inappropriate phrases from work songs, from exhorting us to stop at nothing short of busting our backs. So, if only to humor him, we set to. With herculean grunts, we wrestled the ungainly contraption, bullying it by main force up onto the bed of gravel. Then, pausing only long enough to wipe our brows, we heaved it across the tracks, fitting the grooves of its rusty wheels over the rails.

When I could draw a breath, I decided I'd earned the right to say, “It'll never work.” Lucifer gave me his ye-of-little-faith expression. “Ain't you never hear of nigger-rig?” he said. Then he crooked a finger at Michael, pronouncing a name that, for all I knew, was supposed to make old things new again: “Earl!”

From somewhere in his overalls, Michael produced a small, hemispherical oil can with a needle spout. (By now I was used to how, between them, the twins carried whole general stores in their pockets.) He tossed the can to Lucifer, who proceeded to swarm over the handcar, lubricating its works with a sound like a clucking tongue. With his free hand he scooped out the gunk, the trilobites and spiders, dusting and squirting until moving parts became distinct. The crankshaft began to look like a crankshaft, the flywheel a flywheel, familiar to me from bits of engines that had found their way into the pawnshop. Removing his cap for a shoeshine flourish, Lucifer spanked away the vestigial crud and stepped back to grin. Then he replaced his cap, mounted the handcar, and grabbed one end of the weather-split wooden handle, winking at Michael, who'd already taken hold at the opposite end.