Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (34 page)

I thought it a shame that old Isador hadn't been allowed to take along the console radio, which in his absence I'd begun to conceive a fascination for. It seemed doubly a shame that my grandfather should have been put away when more than ever the radio was bearing out his prophecies.

If you listened to the postscripts of what was going on in Europe, you heard news that out-Isadored my grandpa's worst fears. Having been denied their God-given license to wander, the Jews were being corralled into cages. The few that escaped were forced to live underground; the overseas relations of our neighbors in the Pinch were disappearing from the face of the planet. They were performing a vanishing act on a scale compared to which the disappearance of the flood refugees was small change. And if rabid voices in certain quarters had anything to do with it, the rivergees were only a dress rehearsal for an epidemic of vanishing that might be spreading our way.

Beyond what was confirmed by the radio, there were rumors afoot, tales carried by a handful of greenhorns who'd fallen through cracks to land in our neighborhood. Remove one Isador and half a dozen others spring up to take his place. But these mournful shnorrers were passing on stories that even my grandpa might have hesitated to repeat, which isn't to say they were heeded any more seriously. Still, it was not so uncommon these days to see the ordinarily sociable merchants of North Main Street making like ostriches.

Having gotten the jump on whatever evil happened to be in the air, my papa had made himself a virtual missing person. So scarce had he become that his wife, in keeping with time-honored tradition, had turned to his surviving brother for support. And if Sol Kaplan had uttered any squeak of protest—if, for instance, from his own asylum he'd objected to old Isador's institutionalization—he made sure that nobody heard him. Nor did anyone hear him if he offered me congratulations on the occasion of my sixteenth birthday.

Of course, I wouldn't have been in any mood to celebrate. After you've betrayed your only friends, who felt like celebrating? Who cared anything for birthdays when you no longer dared to show your face at the famous end of Beale Street? Miserable wretches such as I didn't deserve to have birthdays. I was no better than a leper, a candidate for the colony that some said still existed on the far side of Mud Island.

I knew what I was, all right. I was a despicable blue-gum Jew, harmless enough in appearance but liable to turn at any moment, his bite more poisonous than a cottonmouth's. Or was I only flattering myself? If I'd had a hair on my tochis, I'd have jumped off the Harahan Bridge. Weeks later a fisherman snags his hook and up I float, flesh flaking like soggy piecrust, eyes nibbled away by gars. But none of the names that I called myself nor the mortifications I imagined could make me feel any worse than I already did.

I felt awful not so much because I missed the twins as because I didn't seem to miss them enough. Of course I would have given a lot to know how they were getting along, but wasn't that only curiosity? The truth was that ever since the night I'd denied them to Naomi, Lucifer and Michael had faded to dim apparitions in my mind. If I missed them at all, it was in the way that you miss a story someone once told you, a story you're still very fond of though the details have become kind of vague.

I reasoned with myself that they were probably okay. The floodwaters had gone down, restoring everything to the way it was before. Having weathered the crisis of a mostly imaginary malady—I mean, who besides comedians on “Major Bowes” ever died from talking too much?—Michael was once again pushing his broom. He was shadowing his brother, who, freed from the nuisance of ofay apprentices, was at this moment making his prompt underworld rounds. Whatever the case, there was certainly no future in fretting about the twins. No news of their circumstances would ever reach me, not here in my exile on North Main Street, a place that had nothing much to offer a guy who'd been where I'd been.

In fact, the old neighborhood wasn't quite the same after the flood. It had changed, if possible, for the worse, become even shabbier in the wake of the departed river refugees. The shopkeepers and their wives looked worried, their troubles increased, as if the uninvited guests had left behind more in their care. The buildings themselves seemed untended and forlorn, more than ever overwhelmed by invading creepers, which snaked through the broken windows and wrenched loose the strangled fire escapes. The whole street looked as if it had been trussed in leafy cargo nets, ready to be hauled away. Storks might snatch it up and set it down again in some far-off valley of milchik and flayshik, a land more rich and plentiful than the Parkway. People would stumble out of their shops and tenements to the realization that their season in Memphis had been a bad dream. A clammy, unventilated dream of a stagnant atmosphere that was not very conducive to carrying a torch for your cousin.

The more I tried not to think about that night in the pawnshop, the more my thoughts returned to it, the way your tongue will seek a cavity. I kept remembering how—after we'd toppled off the casket and I pulled the cord to see if she was all right—it was suddenly over. The damage was done. We were both self-conscious again. Oh why had I needed to turn on the light? I offered to switch it off again but the mood was already spoilt; Naomi was peevishly scrambling for her clothes. And I, beyond embarrassment, had assumed an awkward pose to conceal a chafing dampness at the fly of my pants.

I began to pick up some of the scattered costumes, making a sullen effort toward restoring a little of its original order to the cage. I was anxious now, and feeling that Naomi might be deliberately trying to get my goat, because once she'd made herself more or less decent, she'd started to dawdle.

“Did you hear that?” I whispered, hoping to frighten her into hurrying, succeeding only in heightening my own nervousness. Every item in the dark recesses of the shop began to resemble a hunkering Oboy watching over us. “Let's beat it already!” I hissed, practically prepared to remove her, if necessary, by force, while at the same time afraid of touching her again. Then, as I wondered what she might for God's sake be waiting for, I took a stab in the dark. “Look,” I told her with no less aggravation, “I love you—okay?”

It's possible that I'd said this before, back when we'd been so inseparable on the lid of Zippe's casket. It's possible that I'd said it in such a way as to alter the course of our grappling, puncturing the humor, pitching us both into a tender loss of equilibrium. But that was then, a time that already seemed like long ago. And now, at this raw early hour of dawn, the words had blundered out as if a toad had plopped from my mouth, a rude little monster that I regarded with horror and Naomi with a certain sly amusement, like she thought it might make an interesting pet.

It seemed that we were in love, my cousin and I—so what was the trouble? The trouble was love. It was enough already for me to try to accommodate my guilty conscience toward the shvartzers without having to share the same space with an overcooked passion for my cousin. It was just too much to fit inside one skin. Other things, such as memory and common sense, would have to be tossed out to make room. After all, we're talking about the teary-eyed, lackluster nishtikeit who used to so royally gripe my can. That's all she was, barring the occasional botched audition as tenderfoot temptress, excluding her headlong excursions into storytelling, night prowling, and masquerading as the queen of heartbreak. But that was it, the complete inventory on Naomi, except for maybe a shtikl of something else.

Something that made me feel as if my heart wore a crown of candles that the ill wind of my conscience kept blowing out, though not before I had the chance to make a wish. So what did I wish? I wished that I could rid Naomi of the something extra. I wished I could shrink her—my darling, my dove, the sweet angel changeling muse—back into a pest again. I wished I could forget all about her.

Whenever I was overcome by the urge to go and give my cousin a squeeze, I remembered the deceit that made me unworthy. I remembered that she was taking up the space in my mind that should have been exclusively reserved for my remorse over the wards of the Baby Doll Hotel. Then I would begin to miss her so much, my Naomi—as if I were marooned on some desert galaxy with a bad case of homesickness. I would feel that my love for my cousin was a punishment inflicted on me for having double-crossed the twins.

So I didn't try to see her, and except for those rare occasions when my mama was around (which meant that the line was generally engaged anyway), I took the phone off the hook. Eventually, in case she should attempt to contact me in person, I stayed away from home. After a week spent lying around the apartment doing nothing, spinning dials on the radio, I'd taken to the streets. I knocked about along the levee for a while, but in the end I went where you went when there was nowhere else to go.

I hung around Kaplan's Loans, which like myself was stuffed full of more junk than it could reasonably contain. Having no pride left to swallow, I thought it might now be fitting if I buried myself in the shlock alongside my papa. Then it seemed cruelly inconsiderate of my father to have surrounded himself with worthless merchandise to the exclusion of the living members of his family.

So I hung around out on the sidewalk next to Oboy and his three-legged stool. If the bullet-headed little golem appeared to have no use for me, I could assure him that he was likewise no friend of mine. It was bad enough knowing as I did that his loyalties were divided between my father and Uncle Morris, but what irked me the most was the perfect impunity with which he moved between the shop and the Parkway and the famous end of Beale. Anyone who lived his life in more than one place—which was as good as aspiring to more than one life—this person was highly suspect in my book.

Even worse than loitering with Oboy, however, was loitering on the spittle-flecked pavement in front of Kaplan's all alone. Which was how I found myself on a morning when the puller, beyond aloof, was entirely absent. It was an event so unheard of that I was tempted to take it personally.

Like the perilous chair in one of Naomi's stories, Oboy's abandoned perch defied anyone to try and usurp it. While I had no special designs on it myself, I couldn't see what harm it would do if I decided to take a little break from killing time. “How do, cap'm, hello doc,” I might say, sitting spraddle-legged astride the stool, hailing customers with the sleight of tongue I'd picked up on my midnight jaunts. “What you know, boss, brother, sportin life, my man? Look like that ol suit a yours is canine surplus, cause it sho nuff got the mange. Now Kaplan's here'll fix you right up…” Though what customer in his right mind would want to enter these impenetrable premises anymore? Besides, Oboy's absence had left me feeling kind of uneasy and adrift. With the stool vacant the shop seemed somehow vulnerable, and so did I, insofar as I was attached to the place. But I wasn't so attached that, given a hint of foreboding, I couldn't just walk away.

I followed my nose, which led me, as reliably as a needle on a compass, down the hill toward the residue from the dried-up bayou overflow.

From Third to Hernando the street was shmutz, like the regurgitations of some omniverous fish. The gutters were choked with corncobs, slab bottles, hairpieces, and turtle shells. There were tin cans full of swimming tadpoles and drowned rats, a stove-in bass fiddle plastered in funny papers, a sausage-fingered gardener's glove wrapped around a knife, a boot sunk in a spectral scum of oil. By the curb at a corner of Handy Park was a foundered skiff, occupied by a candle-thin character in the process of baiting a bamboo pole. Nearby, facedown in a pool of carnelian broth, lay a man either sleeping or deceased, a couple of children poking him with sticks to determine which.

Whereas the department in charge of such things had chosen, throughout the flood, to ignore the standing water on Beale—they'd put their pumps to better use in other neighborhoods, leaving the lagoon to dry up on its own steam, so to speak—that same department was taking its time about collecting the dregs. This meant that the street would remain impassable for yet a while longer. And since it had also ceased to serve as a ferry crossing anymore, the block had no function at all beyond its current status as an open privy.

That was how everybody seemed to regard it, holding their noses to give the fouled pavement a wide berth. So intense was the odor of garbage rotting in the sun that for the plain old fishy stink of the place you might have waxed nostalgic. With their ranks thinned considerably since the refugees had decamped, their heads lowered against the offending stench, the strollers toiled along the sidewalk. On the south side of the street they kept close to the fronts of buildings whose bases were blanched from the vanished water. The very stones appeared to be turning into vapor from the bottom up.

Oppressed as I felt, I didn't need any encouragement to follow the example of the strollers, shoving my hands deeper into my pockets and watching my feet. Once or twice, looking up lest I walk into a lamppost, I greeted somebody I thought I knew. I said hello to Typhus the ice man, whose mule the twins had “borried” for a kiddy concession during Jubilee: they'd cinched a crutch under the old swayback's belly to keep it from dragging the ground. I greeted R. C. Prettyman, the singing pest catcher, who according to legend had rid the Baby Doll of rats with three pesticidal verses of “If You See My Savior.” Then there was Grim Missus Trim the card sharp, into whose beer Lucifer had once poured laxative aloes after she'd stiffed him on a tip. But maybe I was wrong, because none of them had bothered to return my salutation. Anyway it was easy to mistake one shvartzer for another.

Of course it was possible that it was they who had failed to recognize me. But that didn't seem likely, given the enduring impression I was certain I'd made on the street. Who wouldn't remember the renegade Harry Kaplan, who'd been for such a time in and out of everybody's hair? True, I didn't feel much like the kid I'd once been, mascot of a colored bordello and all that, so it was conceivable that in my depressed condition I didn't look like him either. Or maybe I was simply forgotten. Oddly enough, rather than hurt by the idea, I found myself heartened and relieved. If they'd forgotten me already, then so much the better; I was anonymous again, just as I'd been when I first came down to Beale. And being anonymous, nobody would know me for the double-crosser I knew myself to be.