Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  He raved this way without a pause into the evening, swallowing air with every sentence like a preacher. Watching over him, Lucifer had begun to show conspicuous signs of gloating. He kept tugging at his suspenders and grinning his grin, apparently bursting with pride that the dummy had finally shot off his mouth. Here at last was proof of what the wise guy had always contended, that his brother had been able to speak all along. Feast or famine, that’s how it seemed to go with these people: one minute you’re as dumb as a post, and the next you couldn’t shut up to save your life.

  Of course, I hadn’t been deaf to the occasional scraps of familiar stories, albeit in mongrel disguise, that kept turning up in Michael’s rant. Could it be that there was some connection between this delirious narrishkeit and the glut of books on which he had supposedly stuffed himself? If so, if he had indeed been reading the books, then perhaps their provocative contents had been quietly seething away in his system, taking their time to build to a boil. And now he was letting off steam!

  If this was the case, then I was as responsible as anyone for Michael’s verbal coming out. The queen of the Cotton Carnival had only been a sort of coincidental catalyst. I was the engineer. So now when Lucifer grinned, I grinned hugely back at him. We were exchanging smiles like scientists congratulating each other on the successful conclusion of a bold experiment.

  But just when I’d begun to enjoy taking credit for my part in Michael’s relentless shpiel, Lucifer started to look a little troubled. In fact, I thought I detected more than a trace of the panic that I’d seen on his face for the first time down at the levee. It made me wish that he would for God’s sake make up his mind how he felt about his brother’s talkiness.

  “Hesh now, fool,” he cautioned gently at first, repeating the phrase until the pitch of his voice began to rival his brother’s. He’d begun to rub Michael’s hands so vigorously between his own that you’d have thought he was trying to start a fire. When this had no effect, he took to issuing stern warnings of grave consequences; he promised lammings upside the head at the hands of Aunt Honey if he didn’t pipe down. All else having failed, Lucifer sank to his knees and proceeded to bang his forehead against the bedframe.

  I didn’t see why he should get so excited. All of a sudden he was acting like Michael was in some kind of danger. He was behaving as if the reformed dummy’s incessant nattering was as good as a wound that wouldn’t be stanched. It was true that Michael could have looked a little rosier. It was disturbing, for instance, that the cords of his neck seemed to tug at his jaw like taut reins, that his eyes showed only their whites as if he’d been clobbered. His body, bathed in sweat, looked completely bereft of bones, tossed willy-nilly into the sack of his overalls, and his voice in its maiden rant had already begun to grow hoarse. Granted, he didn’t make a pretty picture, but was this any reason for Lucifer to get so upset?

  “My love ain’t never go to glory!” declared the dummy in one of his more fervent outbursts, training his nostrils left and right like a loose double-barrel. “Do she die, I be haint by her still! She my bride!”

  “You crazeh!” Lucifer attempted, a little feebly, to shout him down. Then, making a face like he was forced to swallow a bitter pill, he stated the obvious, “She a white woman,” wearily adding that the pale-faced lady in question already had a king.

  Seeing the wise guy this downhearted, I thought I should maybe try and make an effort to take up where he had left off. “Shah!” I said once or twice to Michael, and “Allaloo,” which was what my mother used to croon when I had tantrums. When these failed to quiet him, I took off the gloves. “Hold your tongue, blackguard!” I shouted, thinking that a literary approach might be the thing. “Belay that! Enough already! Shoyn genug!” But Michael apparently meant to persist in his folly until he’d done himself an injury. And my considered opinion was that we might as well let him.

  Besides, I had become kind of interested in his monologue. I kept trying to identify bits and pieces of old stories as they were tossed up in the stream of Michael’s babel. Here you might recognize Crusoe’s blunderbuss, there Ayesha’s veil, before they were muddled and modified to the dummy’s own ends. It was a dizzying exercise, a bit like trying to rescue articles from a raging torrent: you could drown in the attempt.

  But I was intrigued by the screwball turns of the defective twin’s fantasies. Take, for example, the many incarnations of the Carnival queen. Sometimes she might be an unspoiled bird-girl, treed by high water in branches otherwise reserved for carrion crows. Another time she might be an orphan held captive by a usurer, held as collateral on a loan. She escapes with a troupe of minstrels in a traveling medicine show, only to be apprehended by authorities for possession of a talking goat. Taking asylum in one of the unidentical twin steeples of the Beale Street Baptist Church, she has to be rescued—rescue figuring throughout the shpiel as a cardinal motif. First she’s rescued from the charity ward of the colored infirmary, where she’s been stricken while nursing the blue balls of untouchables. Then she’s rescued from a gibbet at a Delta crossroads, where she’s been hauled up for the crime of wearing a dress too red. She’s provided safe passage in a hollowed-out watermelon with a periscope. Disguised in burnt cork and Jemima calicoes, she performs a hucklebuck for the swamp-dwelling fugitives from the road gang, among whom Michael has placed himself. When her makeup runs, revealing her as her lily-white majesty, Michael bends a knee to thank her for the manumission of his tongue. He pledges that he and his men will fetch her an apple from the mouth of Boss Crump’s prize spitted hog.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this I had to return to North Main Street to put in my nightly appearance. I told Lucifer that I’d be back a little later, though he never bothered to lift his head from his hands. I went home, opened my schoolbooks, and made educated noises, invoking such watchwords as Teapot Dome Scandal and Manifest Destiny. I recited aloud the internal organs of the crayfish. Confident that I’d been largely ignored, I looked around the living room and had the giddy sensation that I’d entered the wrong apartment. When it passed, I yawned and waived my usual practice of waiting for my grandfather to come back from his public prophesying and for my mother to get off the telephone. I went into my alcove, lay down for the couple of minutes I could stand it, and was back at the Baby Doll before ten p.m.

  Michael’s marathon gibbering had not petered out during my absence. Drawn by his ballyhoo (apparently much to Lucifer’s acute dismay), several of the ladies had drifted into the cramped little room. If they’d been shocked upon learning that the silent twin could talk, they didn’t show it any longer, which isn’t to say that they weren’t expressing genuine interest. In fact, the ladies of the Baby Doll appeared to be all ears. Draped over the bars at the head of the decrepit bedstead, reclining at the foot of the mattress, they’d composed themselves as if attending a serenade. Now and again you might hear them utter some whispered comment: “The boy be ride by a talkin blues wootch,” or “He be sho nuff cookin with natchl gas,” but for the most part they kept a respectful silence.

  In the end, however, they weren’t so spellbound that they couldn’t recognize cause for concern. They took turns holding the dummy’s limp hands and coaxing him to sip sassafras tea, which they spiked with alum and grain alcohol. They sponged his face and massaged his potholed noggin with fingers that seemed to search for irregularities beneath the skull. They applied hot compresses to his forehead and passed hankies sprinkled with sneeze powder under his nose. Sometimes during these processes they grazed one another with inadvertently tender touches, with a solicitude that seemed more than sisterly.

  What this put me in mind of was one of Naomi’s stories, the one about the sailor who has himself strapped to the mast so he can listen to the mermaids sing without jumping overboard. But Michael had turned the tables on the mermaids; he’d lured them out of their grotto so they could listen to his cockamamy song. That’s when it hit me what he’d done. The blithering eight ball had gone and found his muse, and his
knocked-out word slinging had woken up a terrible longing in me, never mind the effect he was having on the ladies. As they swabbed his flickering eyelids, Michael looked, in his exquisite agony, almost what you might have to call handsome.

  The close little room was generating a terrific heat. My T-shirt was pasted to my chest with perspiration and my shorts kept riding up between my cheeks. To make matters worse, Aunt Honey appeared in the doorway, sealing the exit with her girth. Huffing like a boiler about to blow from the effort of her ascent, she demanded to know what the ruction was about. Why weren’t the ladies taking care of their clients below? But her first sight of Michael in the grip of his misguided infatuation brought her up short. She cocked her head to one side, causing her hairpiece to slide dangerously, and peered with interest through the slits of her flesh-sunken eyes. She cupped an ear, though the kid was still railing at the top of his ragged voice.

  “Lawd hep us,” she exhaled with a thoughtful regard devoid of her typical bemusement. “Debil done got aholt a that boy’s tongue.” She leaned back for a better appraisal, hands on her prodigious hips, her expression a struggle between consternation and disgust. Then up went her eyebrows, signaling a draw, as she asked ingenuously, “What it all is that he yappin about?”

  Here Lucifer forced himself out of his slump and stepped forward to represent his brother. Hangdog though he was, he still managed to work up a little pantomime. First he aped Aunt Honey’s hard-of-hearing, then flapped his arms one time in a show of befuddlement. It was his turn, it seemed, to play dumb.

  “Sound to me like some kinda gal misry” was what he finally said. This struck me as a sort of tribute to Michael’s new fluency: under its spell his fast-talking brother couldn’t even manufacture the whole of a lie.

  Despite the stuffiness of the room, I could hardly stand to tear myself away just before dawn. Still dopey with fascination, I wondered where was the harm if I stayed a little longer. Such unbridled diarrhea of the mouth couldn’t be kept up indefinitely, and I thought I should see the thing through to its bitter end. Certainly nobody at the Baby Doll would mind my lingering. Wasn’t I almost one of the family, so to speak? Chances were, my absence from the breakfast table on North Main Street would never even be noticed, and the same went for my attendance at the Market Square School.

  A shudder passed through me, as if invisible fingers had given my shoulders a jerk, and I wondered what on earth I was thinking. I was thinking of breaking the ties to my old life for once and all, but it suddenly seemed a crime that it should be such an easy thing to do.

  Late the next afternoon, before returning to the hotel, I stopped off at Mambo’s Tonsoral just in case. Last night’s mishegoss had probably passed with a little sleep—Michael would have had finally to sleep—and I would find the twins at work as usual. That’s what I told myself, if only for the sake of my conscience, because the right thing was of course to wish for the dummy’s speedy recovery. A speaking disorder like his could have debilitating results, and was nothing to fool around with. But when the chief barber told me I would most likely find Lucifer over at the Baby Doll, where his brother had taken ill, I practically rejoiced. I tore through the back yards to save the few seconds that the street route would have cost.

  Michael still lay sprawled in his unchanged overalls, his back against the bars of the swayback bed, his arms and legs disposed like a discarded rag doll. His face was the color of charcoal and his voice, born yesterday, had already aged to a reedy bray. But his raving now seemed somehow less hysterical, more confined to the palpable particulars of his obsession. Having cast and recast his queen in such a variety of improbable roles, with himself alternating between savior and saved, he’d begun today to sharpen the focus. When I came in, he was extolling the various parcels of his beloved’s anatomy like an auctioneer.

  “… See them eyes she got, mo bluer than Silk the Sport sapphire cufflank such as he steal from out the belly button a Delilah. See that hair—hunnerd proof straight evenin sun pour through lace britches. She got them titty like sand dune, and I’se a teenintsy A-rab ringmassah, lead my flea circus ca’van through the valley a they shaddah, cross her middle while she giggle the conniption, make fo the waysis fo winter set in…”

  Crowded into the corner by the ministrations of the ladies, some of whom had spelled the nurses of the previous night, Lucifer hunkered disconsolately. His turned-around cap gave the impression that he was wearing his long face on the wrong side of his head. How else account for such an unheard-of show of grief? In some respects, you could have said that the wise guy looked as much the worse for wear as his blabbering brother. When I squatted beside him, I had to strain to hear him mutter what may or may not have been intended for my ears.

  “Brothah Michael, he ain’t eat nothin, don’t know nobody. Just woofin—tongue be steady flap like I don’t know what. Like a whip done whale his trouble mind to jelly. Go to sleep runnin his mouf, talk in his sleep, wake up his mouf still run…” Here, while I still wasn’t sure that he knew I was next to him, he surprised me by speaking my name. “Mistah Harry,” he said in that tone he reserved for asking the dummy’s advice, “what we gon do?”

  I was stunned that his desperation had reduced him to the point of deferring to me. “But I thought you wanted him to talk” was all I could think to reply.

  “This ain’t talk,” he explained with a patience that I was clearly trying. “This woofin.”

  “So why’d you have me bring him all those books?” I wanted to know. Just what had he expected would come of putting literature in the hands of such a feeb?

  The wise guy was looking at me like what did my question have to do with the price of eggs. “Cause he like to read,” he said simply. That’s when I saw in his eyes that I understood something he didn’t. With his street wisdom of a ragged-trousers Daniel, Lucifer had yet to get it. He still hadn’t made the connection between Michael’s insatiable reading and his current unhinged state.

  He hung his head, crumpling in his corner as if somebody had wadded him up and tossed him there. “Jus seem like my lil brothah have done splode,” I heard him say.

  I was disappointed that the ordinarily unsinkable Lucifer should give in to such shameless sulking, and I suspected that he was feeling as sorry for himself as for his brother. He was mourning the loss of his shadow, who’d taken the spotlight away from him. He even looked physically smaller to me, as if he were shrinking in direct proportion to the unchecked swell of his brother’s delirium. Never before had I been inclined to take Lucifer to task, but I thought he was fair game for it now.

  “Shape up, why dontcha,” I exhorted him, the way Dr. Watson might cajole Sherlock Holmes out of a cocaine funk. “Get hold of yourself, man! You’re Lucifer, named after angels and all that.”

  He gave a snort like a nasal full stop. “Name after evil angel,” he brooded. “Name ain’t nothin but my daddy’s joke, do I even got a daddy.”

  This was the limit. “Ye gods,” I sighed in exasperation, “sometimes I think I just don’t know you at all.”

  At that, Lucifer cut his eyes back toward me again, though only for the instant it took him to declare, “Mistah Harry, you ain’t never know me.”

  The ladies, meanwhile, continued their doting on Michael. They dabbed his parched lips with cheesecloth soaked in Essence of Van Van and Royal Crown soda, then circled him with sheets to hoist him over an enamel thunder mug. They hummed to him as they massaged his neck—though if you didn’t know better, you might have mistaken their humming for encouragement instead of an effort to calm him down. They administered the odd home remedy, trying in vain to get into him a little crow’s meat in sardine oil, or a julep of mashed snakewort and tuckahoe mold, renowned for its sedative properties. They placed a knife under the bed to cut the cord between the boy and whatever jimjams had taken over his tongue.

  Under Sister Pacify’s direction, they poured his specimens into a bowl of egg whites and topsoil. They brushed the mixture in weird ide
ographs on the wall over his head, then covered the bowl with a page of Scripture, which they put at his feet. But mostly they debated the virtues of this or that, of jimweed paste and saltpeter poultices versus horse leeches or cupping glasses or mustard and Jack of War enemas. (I seconded enemas as having been good enough for Harry Kaplan in his grandmother’s day, though nobody took much note.) They argued so much among themselves that you might reasonably have accused them of trying to stall Michael’s recovery.

  It was a suspicion I’d had ever since the gentlemen callers had started checking up on the twin. The word was out on the prodigy of the Baby Doll, and the word was that Michael’s babbling had certain benefits. As I’d heard more than one of the ladies mention, it helped prime their clients for the act of love.