Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (21 page)

One night we came across a moonlight baptism in progress. It was being performed, said Lucifer, by the congregation of the First Beale Street Church of the Everloving Shepherd Who Dwells on High. Having traditionally used the snake-ridden Gayoso Bayou for such functions, they had shifted their site to the new lagoon, which was considered, as a relatively fresh act of God, to have greater qualities of sanctification.

Backed up by somberly clad parishioners, the procession of prospective saints—or “haints,” as the wise guy liked to say—gathered at the water's eastern edge. They were clapping their hands and singing a hymn: “What it say in the ten chapter ten / Is you die you bound to live again.” One by one the candidates for the sacrament of immersion would wade out into the muck, their white gowns parachuting about their hips. After their dunking at the hands of owl-faced deacons, dressed im-practically in slickers, the newly baptized were given to inspired acrobatics in the street. They writhed and tumbled in full view of the fleshpots of Babylon, outflanking Satan with cunning maneuvers. Giving voice to spine-tingling hallelujahs, they called for a witness, which I supposed was where we came in.

“Do Jesus!” they shouted. “I'm testify to the blood and the recollection!” Then the angels seemed to have gotten hold of their tongues, making them sound like tuneful daveners, like a Torah portion might sound if read by warbling birds. It was an observation that prompted my suggesting to Lucifer, “Could be that there's a little Yid in 'em.” Upon which the wise guy, who as always had to have the last word, replied, “What you reckon, Mistah Harry, think they was one or two in the woodpile?”

Another time we saw a fight in a juke joint that was still going on when we went back the next night, though the men were bloodied to featurelessness, moving in a sluggish slow motion, and nobody was paying attention anymore. Then, sent by one of the Baby Doll's high-rolling regulars for ribs to cater a private affair, we went round to Johnny Mills's. In that ramshackle, screen-door institution, smoke feathering out every knothole, I—who'd been more or less kosher from birth—had my first taste of barbecued pork. I chewed meat the consistency of charred embers marinated in axle grease, topped with a pebbly yellow matter indistinguishable from my loosened fillings. Though I put aside the sandwich unfinished, noting how the absorbent white bread held the impression of my fingerprints, I told the twins it was the best I'd ever had. Later on I spat up discreetly in a rubbish pail.

Whenever she saw me hanging around the hotel, Aunt Honey would always ask me whether I was lost. Considering the tumultuous cackling that generally followed this question, I suppose she thought she was being funny. But as much as she seemed to be enjoying herself, moving furniture with her earthshaking hilarity, I can't say I was able to enter into the joke. Aunt Honey excepted, however, the ladies of the Baby Doll had pretty much grown accustomed to having me around. Careless in their attire at the best of times, they seldom took the trouble to cover themselves up for my sake. Quite often I received the heart-swelling mazel, if the heart can sometimes slip below the belt, of a glimpse of magenta nipple peeping out of a flimsy halter. Or, conditions permitting, the fubsy halfmoon of a mole-flecked derrière, revealed for the instant it took to scratch a spider bite. Or a long exposure of coffee flank like a shapely greased beanstalk that only the most nimble could shinny up to paradise.

If ever the women caught me looking, they would gently rebuke me: “I ain't hear'd you say thank y'all, Mistah Harry.” Then they would laugh over the way my ears became inflamed and I tried to cross my legs while standing up. Some of the things I liked most to watch them doing were sighing contentedly at what they saw in a hand-held mirror, tapping their slender fingers on a saucily cocked hip, raking their hair until it stood up like a nest of serpents, dropping an ice cube into the hollow at the base of their neck. Then I liked to watch the slow snail's progress of the ice and the trail of moisture it left as it slid into the dark valley between their bazooms.

In time I came to know them all by name. There was Dido (“cause I likes to cut me one, ef you takes my meanin”), who enjoyed a drop or two of belladonna in her lemonade. And Casauba, who embraced her customers like poured molasses, but kept her face unavailable for kissing behind the veil of her cardinal cloche. There was the back-sassing Sally Sweetmeat, always with a ready remark, with the silvery laughter of a glockenspiel. Her boast was that she'd served time in prison for matricide: “See, we have done quoil bout which side the mattress I spose to be.” And the lazy Sugar Monkey, whose splay-legged bones had turned to rubber under the conflagration of her auburn hair. Concerning her great rolling bosom, the popular theory was that it was subject to tides. Snowpea, the freckle-faced, biscuit-skinned albino, liked to show off her various keepsakes: the whistle made from the ring finger of a dead lover, the ashtray made from the patella of one still alive. She told me, “It were the loup garou what scare me white. Now what done scare you, home boy?” There was the practical-minded Oraldine, who pinned a rose behind her ear during business hours, keeping tally through a system of plucked petals like a botanical abacus. And the devout Sister Pacify, who was a charter member of Brother Scissors' Do Right Church. There it had been revealed that, in the descending chronology of her former lives, she'd been a bride of John Henry, the Shulamite from the Bible, and an Ethiopian priestess turned into a bird and exiled to an island that had sunk off the Florida coast.

The ladies, in turn, had their string of pet names for me: Humpy Moses, Breath'n Britches, Young Massa Calamine, “cause you pank like the lotion and we gon have to spread you where we's itch.” Sometimes they could be relentless in their teasing, always fingering my hair into kiss curls and playing at telling my fortune. Tracing the lines on my palm or the configuration of virgin whiskers on my chin, they would solemnly prophesy the number of hearts I was fated to break. Then, though I didn't understand why this should pass for humor, they would howl themselves into tears. At other times, however, they might suddenly seem not to be playing at all, such as the night that I'd eaten a surfeit of sardines with the twins, and Snowpea tickled me till I let go a resounding fortz. Sniffing the noxious air around me, the ladies had reached the consensus that here was the harbinger of an authentic ill wind. I thought they were kidding, of course, until Sister Pacify sanctimoniously proclaimed, “Fartomancy ain't never lie.”

Frequently the ladies would follow me back to my alcove, or visions of them anyway, which spilled from my mind to crowd around my bed. They stepped up their campaign of teasing me, not giggling anymore but growling low in their throats, their bodies swaying with a feline urgency. That's when they'd swear me to secrecy, then proceed to teach me tricks of love forgotten since the time of the Pharaohs. They taught me tricks named after long-extinct animals and ancient machines, tricks that the Lord Himself was ignorant of—because if He learned of such shameful goings-on under His sun, His out-of-countenance blush would incinerate the world. On such nights I lost the few hours of sleep that were still left to me.

During my trips back to the Parkway to borrow more books, I started to relax a little in the company of my cousin. It was a situation that seemed to be mutual. A certain chumminess, if you will, had begun to evolve between us—so sue me. This is not to say that she entirely dropped her theatrical posturing, or that she didn't occasionally revert to her poor-in-spirit routine. But on the whole she greeted me with what I took to be a healthy enthusiasm. What's more, she even looked to be putting on a little weight. Her gaunt cheeks had acquired what might almost be described as a tawny hue, this from the tan she'd gotten while pacing in her garden. The sun had also tinged her blue-black hair with threads of scarlet, which set off to some advantage the slightly bloodshot cast to her eyes. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Naomi had acquired a kind of gypsy air.

It was clear that my visits were doing her good. This was not a role that anyone could have accused me of seeking, but I confess to having been a little curious about the extent to which Naomi might yet be transformed.

Sometimes I hung around even after she'd loaned me the books, which she'd taken to bringing down to the garden before I could ask. The maid would serve us iced tea with a sprig of mint and sticky macaroons. I munched and sipped while Naomi paced the herringbone bricks, relating the pleasures awaiting me in what she thought I was about to read. I listened attentively, thinking that this might come in handy should she want to quiz me later on. But she never bothered. She was much too busy getting the stories off her chest to inquire how I might have enjoyed them. She was too delighted by the evidently liberating act of giving her library away to worry about whether or not it was put to good use. Not once did she pry or ask for the return of her unsalvageable volumes, nor did she pull a long face when I carried them away, now that she knew she could trust me to come back for more.

Often I felt that, even if the books weren't for me, I still owed my cousin something in exchange. Once I even went so far as to reciprocate after a fashion, telling her snatches of what I'd seen with the twins. I told her about hickory-striped gamblers and double-brained witch doctors, frail sisters with rabbit fever who flounced their dresses to stir the breeze. But, catching myself, I pretended that these were references to characters in books I'd read on my own. I would have been happy to loan them to Naomi, but they didn't belong to me.

In the meantime, having theoretically fed Michael a whole curriculum's worth of reading, I was ready to call it quits. I was wasting my energy, not to mention Naomi's books, on an am horetz, a nincompoop. Of course Lucifer continued to make ridiculous claims for his little brother's progress. (It was ‘Til brothah” because, according to the wise guy's apocryphal version of their nativity, only he had been delivered from his mama in time. “Michael, he gots to be prize out after she have already pass on, which it is how he ain't been all the way born.”) But while I didn't say it outright, I made up my mind that I'd contributed enough to the dummy's fruitless education. Besides, it was Cotton Carnival time, and with so much going on, who would notice if I turned up empty-handed?

Festivities were afoot, and having ignored the whole affair during the previous spring, I was determined this year to make up for lost time. There had been some debate in the local papers over whether the Carnival should be held at all, given the terrible aftermath of the flood. To stage a celebration in the face of so much misfortune would constitute an indecency, said some. But the more common feeling was that a carnival might be just the pick-me-up the city needed. The citizens of Memphis had grown weary of being a population under siege by the river. They moved leadenly among the clutter of flood refugees, like people surrounded by ghosts they refuse to believe in. What they needed, these citizens, was a little relief, and not the kind, as one editorial quipped, that the government distributes along with sanitary napkins and fruit.

Anyway, the Cotton Carnival was one of Memphis's most time-honored traditions, and hadn't the city taken pride all along in its policy of business as usual? The stores had stayed open and the banks had continued to foreclose. The alphabet agencies never slept. While their tracks were hoisted on trestles over the washed-out thoroughfares—except on Beale, which was judged unnegotiable—the trolleys ran relatively on time. And it was safe to assume that the graveyards, give or take a few postponed funerals, remained in use. Bodies were not gathering dust in back rooms, and everyone else's grandmothers were laid to rest with appropriate honors. Not that I worried much about Grandma Zippe these days, or any other members of my family, living or dead.

Like the twins, who were on call for any odd commission twenty-four hours a day, I was learning to do without sleep. As a matter of form, I would put in my appearance at the pawnshop every weekday afternoon, then walk away from it in the early evening. I seldom bothered now with going back to North Main Street for supper; instead, I preferred to scrounge some fried catfish and vinegar pie along with the twins after they got off work at Mambo's. Since my mother thought I was with my father and vice versa—if my father thought about me at all—my freedom was practically complete.

Naturally I still had to return to the apartment at some point each night. If my mama was alone, I would ask her politely—though not too politely, lest she get suspicious—how her day had gone. I would nod with what patience I could muster as she recounted “your grandfather's” latest enormity. I made a diligent show of doing my homework, maybe listened to “The Firestone Hour” with Mama, provided she wasn't on the phone to her brother-in-law. I listened to “The Green Hornet” with Grandpa Isador if he happened to be around and sitting still. At about nine I yawned ostentatiously and remarked what a long day it had been, hoping that anyone hearing me would take the hint. Shutting myself up in my alcove, I waited for the apartment to grow quiet, then I unfolded the bed, plumped the bedclothes, and slipped out the window.

Only once did I feel that my family's influence might have extended farther than I liked to give them credit for. That was when I saw my father's puller in the faded front parlor of the Baby Doll Hotel. I was about to climb the stairs behind Lucifer and Michael when I caught sight of him through the bamboo curtain. He was wearing the mohair sport coat that hung to his knees, making his nautical salute to Aunt Honey and a couple of her girls. Frozen in my tracks, I listened to him croak, “Y'all pardon my hand say gimme do my mouf say much oblige.” It was about the longest speech I'd ever heard him make.

Backing up in a panic, I ducked under the staircase and wondered how I'd been found out. My delinquency discovered, Papa had sent Oboy, citizen of both sides of the water, to bring me back. Well, he wouldn't take me without a struggle. I'd kick his knees, I'd rub out his wrinkles like the writing on the golem's forehead, and he'd sleep for a thousand years. The bamboo jangled and I peeped out to see him scuttling toward the front door, lugging a stuffed leather satchel. When the door shut, I crept from my hiding place and went to a parlor window to look out. I saw him under a lamp on Gayoso Street, handing the satchel to a cigar-puffing fat man in the back of a Studebaker touring car.