Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  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.

  Still confident that the cumbersome museum piece would never budge, I wasn’t too worried about being left behind. But, good sport and all that, I climbed on board anyway. I stationed myself in the middle, at the place that my physics book would have labeled the fulcrum. I was between point A, which was Lucifer, bouncing on his end of the lever like he was prying a tree stump, and point B, which was Michael, hoisting with his rounded back. I tried to remember correctly the principle of virtual work: how the displacement of A, when it’s consistent with the steady restraint of B … or did I have it backwards? Then I noticed an iron tiller sprouting from the vehicle’s innards, and figuring I couldn’t do any damage that hadn’t already been done, I gave it a tug.

  Instantly Lucifer dropped to the planks like a sack of potatoes, while Michael, but for his tenacious grip on the handle, came close to being launched into the air. A hobbled gear groaned and turned over, some skinny rods jogged in place, and the wheels screeched like an aviary. The handcar had lurched into motion. When they recovered themselves, the twins began pumping the handle with a furious zeal, pouring on the elbow grease like competing washboards. After we started to pick up a little speed, the handle began to seesaw practically on its own. The twins bobbed alternately up and down at either end of the planks, themselves become working parts of the machine. This seemed to suit Lucifer, who performed a yipping frog kick with every ascent. Michael remained oddly dignified as he squatted and hopped.

  We were rattling along the top of the bluff, catching glimpses—between stands of mimosa—of the river, umpteen miles wide. Where the slope turned steeper, there was a horizontal park of crape myrtles, their red flares not quite extinguished by the dark. The usual armada of debris floated on the water, intermingled tonight with silver islands of gliding ice. They were fragments, I supposed, of some frozen northern state migrating south, on their way to melt in the Gulf of Mexico. Then the tracks swerved abruptly away from the river, and we were shouldered on either side by abandoned warehouses. There
were walls of broken windows like open mouths with uneven teeth, dangling block-and-tackles, and jutting iron booms. I held my breath for a space until the sky opened up again and we burst clear of the derelict buildings, sailing across an overpass.

  In a moment we were rolling under the eaves of Central Station, with its uncoupled coaches lurking behind plumes of steam on parallel tracks. Along the platform the red-capped porters and waiting families, the stylish ladies sitting cross-legged on baggage dollies, all regarded us like we might be something new in the world. But before they could even make up their minds to wave, we had come and gone. We were headed down the tracks past the red and green beacons into the windy darkness south of the city, our wheels clacking like runaway tap shoes.

  I knew that nothing about this excursion was possible. So how was it that I had come to accept what was plainly impossible? I tried not to think about it, keeping busy, hanging on to the engine housing with one hand and squirting oil into its works with the other. Then the oil can was empty and, since everyone else was occupied, I threw it away. Or rather, I flung it into the starry firmament like Aladdin returning his lamp whence it came. That left me free to straddle the teeter-tottering handle, which I rode like some kind of wild bucking broomstick.

  “Hot-cha!” I shouted, and “Hooee da hooee!” followed by an inspired “Minnie the Moocher, come shake your drawers in my face!” I felt good—knocked out, cross-eyed, birds-in-the-bosom good—and frankly afraid of nothing on earth, except that I might never feel so good again.

  “Mistah Harry done gone me-sugar!” shouted Lucifer, holding on to his cap and grinning like he was personally responsible for having engineered the scattering of my wits.

  After a mile or so, however, my exhilaration was checked a little by the sound of a train whistle approaching from the opposite direction. So it came as a mixture of disappointment and relief when Lucifer called out a timely “We has arrive!” Although, given the remoteness of our whereabouts, the news didn’t exactly announce itself.

  The twins left off working the handle, which pumped with diminishing returns for the stretch it took the handcar to slow to a halt. We jumped down and put our shoulders to it again, derailing the handcar with no less difficulty than it had taken us to mount the contraption in the first place. As it happened, we were just in time, because the locomotive had already appeared, bearing down on us in a tumult of clatter and chuff. To the Lord of my Grandpa Isador (if He could hear me from this place) I gave silent thanks, then looked to Lucifer to find out what was next.

  He was gazing meditatively at the crawling flood plain, his face flickering amid an intermittent galaxy of fireflies. Then he seemed to have made a decision based on his observations.

  “B’lieve I shake some dew off my lily,” he declared above the cacophony of the passing train. When he began to unbutton his trousers, Michael beside him followed suit. The excitement of the handcar ride having taken its toll on my bladder, I also felt the call. There we stood, three pishermen angling our water down the brushy slope, our backs to the boxcars from which hoboes (I suspected) were staring quizzically. Satisfied that the arc of my stream was at least the equal of the twins’, I stole a sneaky peek, comparing their larger lilies to my own—which I conceded, to the mournful tune of the departing train whistle, had neither toiled nor spun.

  “O Lawd, the train done gone,” sang Lucifer, who had not a bad singing voice, with a plangency that gave me a lump in the throat. On that note we buttoned up and backtracked along the ridge a bit, stopping at a point from where you could just see the downtown lights around the bend. Here, advising us to take up fallen branches for cudgels, Lucifer called to all crocodiles to keep out from underfoot. Then he dropped into the weeds below and began to beat the bushes. Behind him we stumbled and slid downhill, swatting stalks hung with little boats that exploded into white asterisks, bats that swooped menacingly at our heads. With Lucifer citing items of interest, as on a field trip—the pair of unmentionables caught up in the cockleburs, the severed possum foot in a trap—we staggered to the bottom of the bluff and burst from a canebrake where the terrain began to level out at the water’s edge.

  And there it was, like some primeval skeleton, drawn to the surface by filaments of starlight from a depth of immemorial years: the ruin of a paddle-wheeled packet boat. Its decks were rolling hills and valleys of warped and rotten slats, some curling at weird angles like cardboard shirtfronts. The twin smokestacks would have toppled but for a rigging of ivy that nearly obscured them, and the gangplanks lay broken in the bow. On the shore side of the boat, the blades of the paddle wheel stood exposed like an immense, decaying nautilus shell.

  For me it would have been enough (Dayenu!) that the thing merely existed, but Lucifer, as usual, had to add his two cents to what was already stupefying enough. He would have me to know that we were in a cove beyond the levee, where this old wreck had lain aground in shallow water since the time of the Bible.

  “Is the Yazoo Queen float,” he concluded, as if what we beheld was a legend come to pass, “then a nigger be next mayor of Memphis.”

  I wished that he could sometimes just stand there and be quietly dumbfounded like his brother. Still, you couldn’t help but appreciate how, through the offices of the wise guy, the past seemed to be getting a second chance tonight.

  Lucifer asked his brother if he wouldn’t mind picking a bunch of cattails, preferably of the dead variety. There apparently being no request too strange for the silent Michael, he immediately turned and wandered off. No sooner had he done so than Lucifer took a running jump. He trounced the canebrake, cleared a gully, and launched himself from what looked to me like a turtle. Cycling his legs in a mad trajectory through a cloud of mosquitoes, he landed in a four-point crouch on the deck of the steamboat. When he stood up the boat shifted under him, restless in its cabled moorings, making noises like an agitated sleeper.

  I would have been happy to stay where I was, admiring the kid’s agility, but Lucifer called out to me, “What you waitin on?”

  “On dry land,” I replied. I might have added that athletic prowess had never run in our family, with the possible exception of an ancestor who Grandpa Isador claimed could pray in midair. But rather than waste my breath on excuses that no longer seemed to apply, I ran forward and flung myself from the riverbank.

  I landed tochis-over-elbows in a sprawl across the slippery deck, the agitated sleeper lurching under me, threatening to perhaps turn over. I crawled a few paces before venturing to get to my feet. Then I sidled over to the wise guy, who, instead of congratulating me, remained deep in the contemplation of a huge ship’s bell. Its wooden frame having long since collapsed, the bell, which was bordered in an algae like luminous jasper, was half sunk beneath the splintered deck. To show I wasn’t nervous, I tried to make conversation: the bell put me in mind of the skirt on an iron maiden. But Lucifer only looked at me like I should show a little class.

  “Spose you the man what can lift it up and rang her clapper?”

  It was at times like these that I would have liked to remind him that he was, after all, a Negro, but I didn’t like to pull rank. Determined in any case that he shouldn’t have the last word, I followed him through what was left of a hatch, clambering up a treacherous companionway of mostly missing steps. We emerged into the steamboat’s fulsome and cavernous interior. Here again the pawnshop stood me in good stead, and remembering the nomenclature of ships in bottles, I recognized our location as the grand saloon.

  The floor, or the part of it that was still intact, stretched away from us in a long, sweeping curve like a rocker on a rocking chair. A finely milled blue light spilled through the blasted roof and the transom of a bottomless pilothouse. It fell past a gallery overtaken by clematis, onto the pane of broken pier glass—runneled in lead like a branched menorah—that lay at our feet. In our strolling inspection, we nosed about in rubble of recent vintage and vestiges of yore: a hand-carved acorn pendant snared in a swatch of mosquito net; a wadded
Chesterfield pack in a bull’s-eye lantern; a tooth at the end of some string attached to the porcelain knob of a fallen stateroom door. With his toe Lucifer stirred some ashes littered with Sterno cans and something like a deflated rubber thumb. There were posts scratched with names and dates from this century or that; a stringless harp frame, overlooked for kindling, which resembled in this grainy light the relic of a bleached jawbone.

  Appearing to know his way around the place pretty well, Lucifer had begun to make a speech. Using (instead of an oil can) the all-purpose agent of his mouth, he restored the Yazoo Queen to her heyday, only with a difference.

  “See, Mistah Harry, after them white folk done been made to walk the plank, ol Razmus he be relax, sip his bourbon an branch on the hurricane deck. Down in the hole you got the Ku Kluxers stokin the biler, so’s the colored chirrens can ride the paddle like on a Ferris wheel. Mysef, I be up on the cap’m bridge, peepin through a spyglass, talkin that deep water talk…”

  He went on to liberate stewards and chambermaids, awarding them the linen suits and bustles of the keelhauled planters and their wives. At first I wanted to let him know that I thought this kind of talk was uncalled for; it was insensitive. Then it occurred to me that two could play at this game. After all, hadn’t my hard-working North Main Street neighbors also earned their right to a holiday?

  “How about we let old Mrs. Ridblatt,” I suggested, “break a bottle of Manischewitz over the bow? Then the Chassids from the Litvak shul, they can take up shuffleboard—they need the exercise. And the band can play some of whatsisname, some of Stephen Foster’s lesser known klezmer tunes. Whaddaya say?”

  Lucifer kicked a can across the floor and opened his mouth like he might be about to ask me for another nickel. But before he could speak, his attention was diverted by the sound of shuffling footsteps behind us.