Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  It was Michael, the nochshlepper, carrying a bushel’s worth of rustling cattails. At such moments as these he really gave me the willies, because just when you’d managed to forget all about him, there he suddenly was. Never mind how he’d been able to get on board with such an armload. Relieving him of all but a handful of his awkward bouquet, Lucifer praised his industriousness. “Very good,” I half hoped he would tell him, “now go and pick a peck of pickled peppers.” But instead the wise guy passed the burden along to me, saying, “Mistah Harry, y’all mind do you bring in the sheaves?”

  Of course I minded. But looking around from behind the dry stalks, I was too curious about what he was up to to object. Having taken the flat bottle out of his pocket, he began to sprinkle the reedy spikes in Michael’s hand. Then he dredged up a match, cocked a hip to strike it on, and set fire to his brother’s cattails. The sudden blaze eclipsed the ship’s saloon, which seemed to retreat back into the dark years.

  Sending the dummy on ahead of us, Lucifer guided me in close behind. He crowded my side to have access to the cattails, bunches of which he kept extracting to feed Michael’s hungry flame. As the torch tended to flare up and quickly burn out, my load soon became more manageable, not that I was enjoying it any more. Sandwiched between the twins like that, I had the uneasy impression they were conducting me into a dungeon.

  We proceeded in silence through the periodic darkness. The only sounds I heard, beyond our footsteps and the crackling flame, were the old tub’s slosh and groan as it rocked underfoot. (Maybe I should have enjoyed the vacation from Lucifer’s mouth, but it was just like him to keep quiet when you most needed him to remind you that you hadn’t stepped off the world.) We were groping amidships, or underneathships—I honestly couldn’t tell where we were, though with every renewed flaring of the torch—like when a Viewmaster clicks into place—some aspect of the steamboat’s eroded vitals was revealed. Now you saw it: a warren of trashed cabins and riven gangway walls. Now you didn’t: and the darkness, which deepened after every dying flame, squelched nauseatingly under our unsure feet. I had the sensation of treading on toadstools and slipping in clumps of mulch, breathing stale air out of the earth’s own descending colon.

  At one point something heavy lumbered across my foot, and when I yiped, all I got by way of comfort was “Ruvah rat down here be big as a yard dog.” After that I went so far as to hook a finger through the hammer loop of the dummy’s overalls. The torch had expired again and the air was almost too close and stinky now to inhale. Furthermore, we seemed to have dead-ended. Striking another match, Lucifer rekindled the reeds, which showed us to be in a blind space the size of a closet. We were facing a boxlike affair covered over in a furry pelt of moss, a kind of inside-out terrarium. In the center of the box was a turfy hole sprouting spores around its rim. This was no ordinary toilet. On this one you could imagine that some fiendish creature, half goat and half man, came to rest his shaggy nates and unload his corruption straight into the pit of Gehinom.

  Taking the few remaining stalks from my hand, Lucifer borrowed a light from Michael’s failing torch. He removed the slack belt from his trousers, which slipped halfway down his shorts, so that I wondered a moment if he intended to compound the indecency of this place. But instead of sitting, he wrapped his belt around the fistful of cattails, drawing it tightly through the buckle. Then he knelt in front of the box and lowered the flame through a sizzle of cobwebs into the hole. Instantly we were plunged into the most abysmal degree of darkness yet. There was nothing now amid that sulphurous stench—save the knock and sway of the riding boat—against which to gauge your position in the universe.

  Because the torch had such a fleeting life, we got only a momentary glimpse of what lay in the hole. I had just enough time to see a torpor of iridescent ripples, braided rainbows on the surface of oily water, as if invisible fingers were smearing paint in slow motion with glossy, serpentine strokes. Then darkness again, and I bit my trembling lip to try and figure it out. Didn’t rushes under water look something like that, all undulating like sinewy hair? But what did I know from rushes? Well, for one thing—rubbing the goose pimples on my arms — I knew that they weren’t ordinarily so corpulent. They didn’t coil and twine in such radiant loop-the-loops, artfully unknotting themselves.

  Lucifer unriddled the mystery. “Mus be a millyum moccasin down there,” he reckoned, freezing my blood.

  Back on terra firma, I could have kissed the Mississippi mud. It was great, I assured the twins as we scrambled up the slope, to be alive in the twentieth century, which was frankly the only century worth being alive in.

  “Ain’t no right-in-the-head centry would have you,” said the wise guy.

  We arrived at the top of the bluff just as another string of boxcars was being shunted slowly back toward town. Never one to pass up a free ride, Lucifer directed us in camouflaging the handcar so that it shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. This we made short work of, covering it with brush until we’d restored it to its status of a nearly invisible eyesore. Then we ran alongside the train and grabbed on at the first available boxcar door; we hauled ourselves into the open car and rolled out of view, hugging the walls. When we’d determined we were the sole occupants of that dark, jolting space, completely tuckered out, we collapsed, sliding down the walls to the hay-strewn floor.

  From where I slumped adjacent the twins, I could hardly see them, except when an occasional slant of light made their eyes (and Lucifer’s teeth) dance a duet. But tired as I was, I still had to hand it to him, the way he could keep on talking even while disembodied. I guess it was an acquired taste, this chin music of Lucifer’s, but you could get addicted. You could come to depend on the way it made outrageous events—witness Harry Kaplan riding the rails—seem almost commonplace.

  He was making the usual medicinal claims for his corn liquor. “Put a hair on yo hiney ef it ain’t tear it apart,” he cautioned as he handed the bottle to me. I accepted in a spirit of comradeship. But after I’d swallowed, I detected a change in his tone of voice, as if the fighting for breath that accompanied my drinking had put him in a serious mood.

  “Our daddy name us after angel,” he divulged like someone had asked him, then waited for me to say “Un-hunh” before going ahead. “He was a educated man, know everythang.”

  He paused again until I’d inquired after his father’s whereabouts—though since when had he ever needed any prompting from me? This confessional mode was so unlike Lucifer that you could almost suppose it wasn’t. You could imagine, for instance, that it belonged to the dummkopf brother beside him, an idea that caused my scalp to crawl. But once the voice had found its groove, I was reassured that it was none other than the wisenheimer twin’s.

  “They say he stay somewheres up no’th, my daddy, round Chicago what it is call the sweet home, an I bet you he rich is he ain’t in jail. Putty soon us gon after him, gon know him soon as we sees him. He be dress snappy like a G-man, wearin them reptile shoes, talkin Humpty Bogart-style, prolly in rhyme. Be lookin smart as a solidgold wisdom toof. We meet up, he bound to make I an Michael his partner, say, ‘Where y’all been, I be needin boys what am sly but ain’t fly.’ He gon set us up to manage his juju factry, gon operate his wet-yo-whistle concern out the back of a Hupmobile…”

  As always, I appreciated Lucifer’s confiding in me, though it also made me a little uncomfortable. You never knew where the facts left off and his imagination began. All you could really be sure of about the twins was that they were orphans, though certain parts of the story tended to remain consistent—such as that their mother had died giving birth to them, leaving the brothers to the care and guidance of Aunt Honey. The rest, including the father who’d presided at their christening, Lucifer might have been making up as he went along. It was his orphan’s prerogative, I supposed, and the truth was, I kind of envied it. I figured that by now I’d earned the right to be considered an honorary orphan, and was even moved to mutter as much aloud. Taking another swig from
the bottle, I added that my own fershluginer family could drive a person to, I dunno, read a book.

  While he’d continued his speech straight through my complaining—“We own sit in our daddy congregation, get the spirit mos every night”—Lucifer perked up abruptly on the tail of my last remark. It was apparently all he’d heard.

  “We been to school,” he bluntly informed me, as if I’d challenged him to the contrary. “Aunt Honey, she up an pull us out, say them high-tone notion turn a po boy brain to puddin. Say it have fill us with dicty idea till we ain’t even sweat. Say, ‘I lam yo nappy hade do you don’t be workin, y’all already in the college a bust-yo-butt.’ Now I ax you, man, when do I gots time prepare yo lesson? Course, Michael here, he feature our daddy, be a fool for a book. The nigger got a reglar readin jones.”

  I didn’t know why Lucifer should set such store in their having been to school when what I admired most was that they no longer went. And as for the stuff about the dummy’s literary bent, that I’d heard it all before didn’t make it any easier to swallow. Maybe guessing as much, the wise guy was quick to assure me that, while Michael had read his Bible cover to cover, along with any stray copies of Crackajack Funnies that fell into his hands, what he really preferred was a storybook. “He have a partikler sweet toof fo them itchy-pants littachoor, got a very romantic nature, don’t you know.” The problem was that—if you excluded the illustrated dreambooks (combining spiritual advice with tips on policy play) and the ubiquitous Mr. G. P. Hamilton’s Beacon Lights of the Race, a copy of which could even be found among a stack of Silver Screen?, at the Baby Doll—books were a scarce commodity on Beale Street. Nor did it help that the colored people of Memphis were forbidden to hold library cards.

  “So they it is, yo honah,” said Lucifer, seeming to rest his case. Though just exactly what case that was, I couldn’t have said. I supposed that I was expected to offer a word of sympathy. I deplored the drought of reading matter among the Negro citizenry; I shared his helplessness in the face of injustice. But before I could work myself up to it, the wise guy had attached a postscript.

  “Now, do you reckon y’all can find it in yo raggedy heart, which you might have to reach fo it in yo britches, an do my brothah Michael a favor?”

  So that’s what he’d been leading up to. Having gone to such lengths to escape the side effects of my own reading, now I was being asked to procure books for others. Of course it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been expecting something like this. In fact, I was actually pleased that the time had finally arrived when there was something for which the twins had to come to me. It was turnabout, wasn’t it? What’s more, I would be a figure of intrigue, a smuggler, running contraband books to Negroes at the risk of giving them ideas above their station. There was more than a little Scarlet Pimpernel in such a project.

  So what was eating me? Was it that, having fooled around all I wanted in the twins’ own preserve, I still wasn’t too cozy with the notion of their encroaching on mine?

  Since I could only make out one pair of eyes now, I assumed that Michael’s were closed. Lulled by the rhythmic tattoo of the rails (fershlepta krenk fershlepta krenk, they seemed to be saying after my grandpa: a lost cause a lost cause), he must have fallen asleep. Except when a light along the tracks flashed an extra form slumped in the corner, no part of Lucifer’s phantom of a brother was visible. So even as I agreed to the favor, I had to sigh over its pointlessness, the idea of wasting books on someone who wasn’t there.

  Eight

  In the beginning I went to the old frame pile of the Neighborhood House, where Mrs. Birnbaum taught the greenhorns how to brush their teeth and do the box step. She also kept a little library of mostly bound Reader’s Digests and illustrated Bible stories, with here and there a book based on a movie or an Earl Derr Biggers mystery thrown in for spice. I asked her if I could borrow some kiddie books for a neighbor’s sick child; lockjaw was what I said the child had. Maybe I shouldn’t have appointed myself the judge of what Michael ought to read, since Lucifer was, after all, the authorized spokesman for his brother’s tastes. But who could believe Lucifer’s amazing claims for the dummy’s aptitude? In any case, I still wasn’t too clear about the kinds of books the wise guy suggested, so I decided to proceed with care. Anything too sophisticated might prove an irreversible shock to the dummy’s system.

  So for his own good I brought Michael Mrs. Wigg’s Cabbage Patch, The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts, Uncle Remus, of course, some Mother Goose, and a Lucky Lindy coloring book. Lucifer promptly returned them, thanking me kindly but reminding me that his brother had been out of didees for some years, or hadn’t I noticed. Then he added, getting down to specifics, “Ain’t no lovey-dovey in these here book, ain’t nobody be drop they drawer.”

  This was when I began to get suspicious. Could it be that the wise guy was using his brother as an excuse to ask for books he was too ashamed to request for himself, books that were not likely to be found on Mrs. Birnbaum’s shelves, or any other shelves within my immediate reach? Though in all my browsing I’d never actually come across these books, I knew well enough that they existed; they had titles like Confessions of a Stableboy and Betty’s Petticoat Nights. And I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have liked the chance to examine such properties at first hand. But it was beyond me why anyone who lived in such a sink of depravity as the Baby Doll should care to read about more of the same. Talk about your coals to Newcastle.

  I apologized to Lucifer for having insulted his brother’s intelligence, and the next day I went to the public library on Front Street. Not without a little meanness, I selected a stack of the fattest volumes I could carry. They were triple-decker novels whose jackets proclaimed them to be great tales of love, though when you flipped through their pages, you could see that nothing happened: ladies had long talks with the vicar, they got the vapors and drank tea in bed. They were the sort of books that gangsters might tie to your legs before throwing you into the harbor. As a bonus, I kicked in a couple of volumes of poetry, the type where every other word is in Greek, and the endpapers have swirling designs like flushing commodes. When Lucifer handed them back to me after a week or so had elapsed, he assured me that these were more like it.

  This was confusing. Now I wasn’t so sure anymore that the wise guy had wanted the books for his own purposes—unless when he said hanky-panky, what he really meant was dull and turgid goings-on. So maybe he’d merely misrepresented his brother’s tastes in favor of his own salty preferences. But then you had to buy the idea that it was Michael who had read the books. One thing certain, however, was that someone had read them, or at least put them through some kind of harrowing paces, because the books came back to me looking like they’d been to war. Their bindings were bowed, the unstitched cloth corners showing cardboard fanned into tassels. The spines were unglued and the pages limp and dog-eared where they weren’t actually torn. They were books that gave the impression that someone had looted them for their contents.

  The library didn’t look with favor on such abuse. They gave me a stiff fine, which I would have to pay in installments, nor would they let me borrow more books until I’d made good on the damaged ones. In the end I was left with no choice but to sacrifice a part of my own private collection. I told myself that, since I’d outgrown any serious interest in such juvenile fare, it was a small price to pay for renewing my passport to the underside of life. So why was it that I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was throwing good books after bad?

  Among the casualties were E. W. Hornung and Lord Dunsany, Lost Horizon, When the World Shook, The Land That Time Forgot, and Voyage to the Center of the Earth, the latter in its vintage Big Little Book edition. So roughshod was their treatment on Beale Street that, by the time I got them back, the books were maimed beyond a hope of ever being read again. What’s more, they were filled with fishbones and crumbs, watercolored with pot-likker stains; they were smeared with yams as if the reader had literally consumed them with his meals. This wholesale laying
to waste of my library might have been easier to take if somebody had shown a little appreciation. But while the books were returned with their pages as wilted as sucked artichoke leaves, nobody so much as belched to prove they’d been digested.

  I had not entirely ruled out the possibility that Michael was a closet reader, but where was the evidence? Not that I expected him suddenly to acquire the coolheadedness of a Raffles, the cheek of a Richard Hannay or Harry Faversham’s calculated recklessness, but Michael remained always only his own stolid self.

  “It look like he be steady rasslin with them storybook,” Lucifer had alleged. “Sometime he be trine to get on top of it. Sometime them story, it have thow him on his funky behine.” But when I asked if I could see for myself, Lucifer told me most assuredly, “Nosuh!” Michael was very sensitive about being observed at his reading. I said I was sorry, feeling like I’d asked to spy on some act of intimacy.

  After another week of seeing my once prized collection so savagely used, I decided that my part of the bargain had been fulfilled. Hoping to preserve the few volumes that remained on my shelves, if only as souvenirs of my youth, I told Lucifer that my library had bottomed out.

  He clucked his tongue and doffed his hat, frowning into it, then looked at me and said, “Tha’s a sho nuff cryin shame.” I shrugged and Lucifer concurred—all of this, incidentally, in the presence of his brother, who showed not a trace of disappointment. But no sooner had I relaxed, assured that the subject was dropped, than the wise guy revived it again. “Now wherebouts y’all reckon you might see can you borry some mo?”

  I told him that this was no longer my problem. If it was so all-fired important that his brother should be in the business of mutilating books—which he’d done well enough without before I came along—then Lucifer could just go and find the victims himself. I would be happy to lend him whatever advice I could, though if you asked me, there were probably very sound reasons for keeping shvartzers in the dark. No good could come of this kind of indulgence.