Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  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.

  I wasn’t so confident about this idea that I was ready to face Mambo’s, where a stranger couldn’t always count on a welcome reception, but I did suddenly find the gumption to creep around the corner for a furtive glimpse of Gayoso Street.

  The shoebox frame of the Baby Doll stood in its perpetual need of upkeep and repair. The whole termite-riddled structure—fake brick shingles frilly with a barnaclelike fungus—was stranded in a dry dock of bitterweed, of bald dandelions and wilted sunflowers like shower heads. The broken windows were stuffed with rags, the Coca-Cola sign hanging crooked, its legend faded to mystery. The red bulb dangled over the door like some raffish version of the everlasting light in shul.

  Beneath the light on the broad front stoop, her bottom sagging through the seat of her wicker lawn chair, sat Aunt Honey. She was wearing her three-tiered tangerine wig, a housecoat the size of a gospel tent, and her pair of old mules with the toes out to air her bunions. In one hand she fluttered a church fan with a cloud-walking Jesus, his heart showing through his chest, and in the other hand she brandished a flyswatter. This gave her the look of some formidable dual-sceptered pharaoh. Her legs, constricted by the tourniquets of her rolled-down stockings, were planted far apart: the pillars of a gate at which, before entering, you would have to abandon all hope. Her moon-wide face, satiny with sweat, was frowning in general irritation. But as I stepped from behind a phone pole, palpitatingly edging closer to the foot of her steps, I saw her irritation become more localized.

  I planted myself dead in front of her on the dusty walk, having made myself an easy target for whatever she might have to say. Why else was I there but to face the music and place myself in the way of bad news? “So come on already,” I beseeched her under my breath, “make with the pogrom.”

  But Aunt Honey stubbornly refused to do me that favor. She stirred in her chair, and for an instant I had the wild hope that she was about to call up to the twins that Mistah Harry was here. But instead she rolled her slitted eyes slowly in the direction of one of her scepters, then back again toward me, as if she thought I wasn’t worth swatting. Then she asked me what had once passed for a breezy byword between us, though you needed better ears than mine to catch the humor in it today.

  “Is you lost?”

  In an open window behind her a couple of the ladies, their names on the tip of my tongue, were lazily sunning themselves. They were eyeing me with the cool distance that was usually reserved for characters too poor or damaged to be considered as prospective customers.

  I could have told Aunt Honey that lost wasn’t the half of it, but I didn’t want to push my luck. After all, hadn’t I just been let off the hook? Hadn’t she proved to my satisfaction that, due to the short span of attention for which darkies were famous, I was as good as forgotten down here? It was as if I had never before set foot in these squalid parts. And since they’d dropped me from their memories so readily, then the least I could do was to return the kindness. Twins, what twins? Did I know any twins? Except of course the Gold Dust Twins, those hula-skirted jungle bunnies wiping dishes on the side of the soap flakes box.

  Any connections I thought I might still have among the shvartzers were hereby dissolved. I stood exonerated in my mind, released from all outstanding debts. I could go back to Naomi now with a clear conscience. I could go and adore my precious cousin like gangbusters, with no checkered past to interfere. Yellowjackets flew out from under the eaves as if to show me the door, but I needed no help to find my way out of there. I flapped my arms once in a sign of futility, twice to shoo the wasps, then turned away.

  The empty bootblack’s stand shoved far into its corner told me all I needed to know, though I still had the goading temptation to put my reborn anonymity to the fi
nal test. (Or was it that I was more a glutton for punishment than for love?) So I opened the screen door to Mambo’s Tonsoral. Clippers and lips ceased to buzz; everyone froze. This, I thought, is where I came in.

  “My mistake,” I excused myself with a little wave. But before I could back out the door, one of the younger barbers, the part in his processed hair like a bullet crease, piped up, “Where you been, you look so poorly? It look like you done been whup with a ugly club.”

  “Whup with it nothin,” one of his colleagues threw in. “Why that chile are a charter member.” He mimicked his own snickering laughter with his scissors.

  “Boy so ugly his own mama ain’t claim him,” said a customer seated against the plate-glass window. “And his mama, she ugleee! man, I talkin mud fence. Talkin stop yo watch whooch it ain’t even a stopwatch.”

  “Talkin gag yo sink.”

  “Talkin sour yo dough, hear what I’m say?” offered a man bearded in shaving cream, sitting abruptly upright in his reclining chair. “So ugly it a sour the whole a yo marry life, turn yo testimonials to a peach pit.”

  “So ugly it a make Kang Kong look lak Jean Hollo.”

  “Make Fly Face look lak Mothah Mary from the Bobble.”

  “Whoa now,” called out a senior barber in an attempt to restore a little order, only to succumb to the general frivolity himself. “Thow Mistah Harry in the bayou, heh heh, skim ugly off the top fo a week.”

  Until then I’d supposed they were giving the white folks the business; they were letting me know I should take a hike. But when I heard my name, I understood what they were really up to. They were putting me in the dozens, me, my own self, heaping on the insults with a generous familiarity. A recognized citizen of Beale Street, I had been singled out for friendly abuse.

  The whole barber shop had gotten into the act. Having exhausted so many variations of “ugly,” they moved on to “tainted,” “flicted,” “rurnt,” and “low.” “So low he can walk under a snake belly with a top hat on.” I was this, that, I put one of them in mind of a dream he’d had one time … Everyone was slapping his knees with rolled-up newspapers, yawping over such an abundance of mother wit. I was getting the full treatment, luxuriating in their needling just this side of a steam towel and scalp massage.

  The door swung open and in walked a party with the unmistakable severity of a deacon. Frowning, he took a seat and directed his gaze high above the barber chairs, reading the writing on the wall—the sign forbidding the playing of dozens. Such was the effect of his censure that the subject was immediately dropped, joviality subsiding into sighs, and I was left standing with an outmoded grin on the spot where the floor tiles sloped toward a hair-clogged drain.

  I wanted to implore them not to stop, I liked it. Call me an unleavened cracker, anything you please. When I saw the senior barber abandon his basin and come around his chair to take my arm, I was hopeful he might still have a lick or two to get in. He tilted his head toward me, a polished caramel dome wreathed in a horseshoe of white wool, but instead of a gibe, all I got was his earnest inquiry: “Where you been, Mistah Harry? Aunt Honey and her stablishment, they be’s mad wicha cause you ain’t attend the funeral.”

  I stepped back a pace from the drain, which suddenly seemed a dangerous place to stand.

  “The whole syndicatin street have turn out,” the barber went on. “Man, it were the biggest plantin party since I dis-recollect when.” He paused to gather historical perspective. “Yeah Lawdy, if it weren’t a reglar grievin jamboree, tha’s what I calls it. Shoulda seed all them bobtail lady in they fripry attire, look lak flowers in a hailstorm the way they carry on. And Aunt Honey, she done take the cake; they ain’t never a soul could outshine her fo blubberation. Cain’t nobody stop her but she gots to ride that casket to glory if tha’s what it take, which it don’t seem to once she got the witness out a her system.

  “I declare, you had yo Knights a Pythias band. Got the preacher Reverend Hightower, he be sayin how the devil done unbutton the po boy’s lip but it were the angel have fasten her shet again, which what you reckon he mean by that?”

  Then the barber let me know that I wasn’t the only one who’d been conspicuous by his absence from the ceremony: “Course, he ain’t never say a mumblin word one to nobody, that ol rapscallion Lucifer. Boy sho am a study—if he ain’t jus up an tooken off!”

  It was funny how I seemed to know what the barber would say before he said it. I even knew the part he neglected to tell me: where the surviving brother, the one who’s been struck dumb by the death of his twin, sets off to follow the North Star in search of his lost voice, or maybe his lost father. In stories like these something always has to be lost. I knew also that, at the close of the story, the kid would be pumping a railroad handcar over bridges; he’d be rattling across deserts and glacial chasms into rain forests dense with a poison fog. When last seen, he’d be rolling swiftly down the tracks across the plain, toward a vanishing point in a city whose towers cast their shadows a hundred miles.

  I seemed to have it all by heart already, but then I knew a lot of stories—only judging from the barber’s persistence, he actually meant that I should believe this one. A mute twin dies of a chatterbox disease and his brother clams up and disappears. Have a heart. These people, they were always trying to hand you some line.

  “Look,” I said to the barber, gently, the way you talk to a crazy person, “I’ve got to be going.” I reclaimed my arm with such a jerk that I practically fell backwards out the door.

  Stay calm, I told myself out on the sidewalk, wanting only to put as much distance as I could between me and Mambo’s. But within seconds I had broken into a full sprinting flight, bolting past the Pie in the Sky Funeral Parlor, past the cosmetology institute and the Independent Pole Bearers lodge hall and the grease-filmed windows of the One Minute Café, before my brain would admit what I’d glimpsed in the corner of an eye. Still, it took another half a block before I could slow down. I turned and retraced my steps back to the storefront mortuary.

  Behind the dirty window the formally attired dead man sat in his timeless rigidity on a bald velvet throne. No longer alone, however, he had acquired an equally shopworn companion, the salt shaker to his pepper, seated a little lower beside him in a Windsor chair. She was wearing a heavily starched serge shirtwaist with a linen apron, the kind suitable for throwing over your head against approaching Cossacks. Her fingers lay twined in her lap like a lump of fossilized challah; from beneath her leaden skirts, looking pugnacious, poked a thick pair of lace-up brogans. A hand-painted babushka, souvenir of Coney Island, was tied toothache-fashion about her wispy jaw, framing a face the texture of a cured tobacco leaf. In that face a single dry eye (the one Mr. Gruber had presumably been unable to keep shut) remained open, so that the other appeared to wink.

  This is your bubbe, I whispered to myself. This is your Grandma Zippe, who’s been given to a second husband on the other side.

  I imagined the indignities she must have suffered during her journey to this window, how her joints must have splintered when she was folded into her chair—though sitting was the thing she always did best. I saw myself kicking through the glass to repossess her, buttonholing passers-by to join me in appropriate prayer. At the same time I tried to assure myself that things could be worse. Wasn’t she already forgotten by the family? Even her widower husband had long since graduated from a personal mourning to a more universal despair. Assuming that death constituted a legal separation, she was free to keep whatever company she chose. And if you could take her perpetual wink at face value, maybe she was hinting that this colored stiff was at least better company than an empty samovar.

  So who was to say that old Zippe wasn’t just as well off here as in her box back at Kaplan’s Loans? Still, I couldn’t help wondering just how my grandma had wound up in such society in the first place. I don’t know how much longer I might have stood there trying to puzzle it out, if the door to the mortuary hadn’t suddenly opened and out walked Oboy.
He was wearing a furniture pad draped like a tallis about his shoulders, pushing a steel dolly as tall as himself with one hand. With the other he was stuffing a wad of bills into his pocket.

  Behind him must have been the undertaker himself, a portly man with his thumbs tucked into his suspenders, a gob of snuff distending his upper lip. When he saw me, he spat once and proudly declared, “Young white ge’man, be so kind as inform yo kinfolk, this here Pine the Sky am a ambidexter stablishment. Cater all color clinetele.”

  To Oboy, who was walking away, I shouted, “Wait just a cockeyed minute!” But he never even looked over his shoulder. He picked up his bandy pace, beginning to steer the two-wheeler at a reckless zigzag down the sidewalk. Coaxing my tush into motion, I started to give chase, though I didn’t know quite what I’d do if I overtook him. Would I shake an accusing finger in his leathery kisser, its fixed whammy as immutable as those on the pair that he’d joined in the mortuary window?

  He was veering at a dangerous tilt behind a group of street corner vagrants when I blinked and lost sight of him, but rather than pause to investigate his vanishing, I just kept running. Having worked up the head of steam I needed to see me clear of the underworld block, I galloped on at a breakneck clip. I streaked under the Palace Theater marquee and out across Hernando, charging through the litter on the fringe of Handy Park. At Third Street I put the dreck of the lagoon behind me for once and all. I was making like blazes up the hill toward my father’s shop, almost home free, when I was halted in my skidding tracks yet again.

  A little knot of onlookers had gathered outside the pawnshop, a mud-spattered Black Maria parked at the curb.

  I dove into the first of the show racks, falling back among the smelly suits, clinging to a basted twill pant leg as I gulped for air. Warily I peeked out to spy on the baggy-faced shamuses McCorkle and Priest in their level straw skimmers, their open jackets revealing shoulder holsters like harnesses for their barrel chests. Solemn in the performance of their duty, each had a firm grip on one of my father’s arms, escorting him between them out the door of his shop.