Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (15 page)

It took me the better part of a block to put on the brakes and turn around. I hadn't quite counted on how apprehensive I would be to see him. He was standing next to a fireplug in his undershirt and rug coat, his hands thrust nearly to the elbows in his gaping pockets. It was a posture studiously duplicated by his brother beside him in the ragged straw hat and overalls.

“Mistah Harry,” commented Lucifer when I'd come back within greeting distance, “you must be the most runninest white folks in town.”

I wanted to explain to him how, when last seen, I wasn't exactly running away. It was just that I'd remembered I had important matters to attend to. There was no end to the responsibilities associated with a pawnshop, he should understand. But instead, still winded from my long dogtrot through the alleys from North Main Street, I leaned casually against the fireplug, like I was accustomed to taking the air at this hour in shvartzer neighborhoods.

There followed an awkward moment when Lucifer, who'd hailed me amiably enough, retreated to a more impersonal “Hidey.”

“Hidey,” I replied with perhaps a little too much bluster, picturing in my agitation a colored girl picking edelweiss on a mountainside. Then I braced myself and came right out with it. “That forty-five cents you still owe me.” At the mention of this Lucifer made a face like he hadn't the foggiest. Like, even if he knew what I was talking about, it didn't erase the fact that certain parties were starting to become a nuisance. So be it, I thought: a nuisance is better than the chicken-livered wonder I was determined he shouldn't see again. “Course, it's all the same to me,” I went on, “but now that I think of it, that forty-five cents … How much, you know, sightseeing will it get me?”

Lucifer reared back with his hands on his hips to size me up, shaking his head like I just wouldn't do. He tugged at an earlobe to coax the subtle workings of his brain, then looked toward the silent twin for advice. When none was forthcoming, nothing but the other's somber vacancy, Lucifer nodded anyway; the point was well taken. Pulling a toothpick out of his cap, he began to pick at a point of light that gleamed from a prominent incisor.

“I have you to know,” he formally announced, “that I an my honable brothah, we bout to commence our shank-a-the-evenin round. Got to visit certain underworld stablishment. Be proud do you woosh to company the bofe of us two.”

It was a dare only thinly disguised as an invitation. But before I could puff myself up enough to answer, the wise guy had already started to walk away. “Jus say uncle when you done had enough,” he added over the shoulders of himself and his brother, who shambled in lockstep at his heels.

I told myself that this was what I'd come for, wasn't it?—though I wished he'd given me time to study the pros and cons. But never mind. I intended to show him what I was made of, how I had graduated in a single afternoon from a fraidycat to a full-fledged I-don't-know-what. The word “goat” came to mind.

The way the kid behaved, you'd have thought that he owned the street, which I was perfectly content to believe. Dogging Lucifer's coattails, slightly to the rear of his brother's single-strapped overalls, I was happy to be a shadow once removed. Hadn't I been sore thumb enough for one day? I kept close behind them with my profile low, imitating a little (as did his brother Michael) Lucifer's loose-limbed walk—the way his hands scooped the air as in a swimmer's stroke. Once I paused only long enough to do a double take at the spectacle of a one man band. Then I learned, as I hurried to catch up with them, just how much I didn't want to be left behind.

When I asked what exactly was the nature of these evening rounds, Lucifer turned to say only, “Round mean lak in a circle.” But pretty soon it became apparent that what they were doing was running errands. They were couriers, delivering messages to men in Stetsons with snakeskin hatbands. Men with hair like crows' wings and parts like zippered seams, with gold-inlaid stars in their teeth. These were none too friendly characters whom Lucifer didn't seem to mind distracting from intense pursuits. They might be, for instance, involved in drawing a bead down the shaft of a custom pool cue; they might be blowing on a pair of dice or shuffling cards with such dexterity that it looked like they were playing accordion—when Lucifer chose to butt in.

With his mouth running in its fluent patter, he took what looked to me to be dangerous liberties, hailing these rough customers by name. “Hello Hardface. Shithouse, how do, y'all still on the ruination train? 01 Nine Tongue here be drinkin that ugly milk, fo long his head turn to a biscuit. What say Mastah Ajax, which his mama she be teachin me to lawdy-lawd. An they's Race Riot hissef, what I'm hear got him a sissy man…”

From the depths of his fathomless pockets, he would draw forth the ribbon-bound envelopes that the men sniffed discerningly. Then they appointed the scholar among them to read aloud, for the edification of all, the sometimes amorous, sometimes petulant (often vengefully poison-pen) billets-doux from the ladies of the Baby Doll Hotel. After that the scholar, turned scribe, would draft a dictated reply, naming rendezvous and such. This was dutifully scrolled and handed back to Lucifer along with his gratuity. Sometimes there were tokens exchanged in the transaction—say, a lady's frilly nothing for a gentleman's solid-gold something—which Lucifer might fetch from and return to an office annex under his brother's headrag. Occasionally the tidings were not so welcome: subpoenas and court summonses for those who used the Baby Doll as their mailing address. Then I noticed that the wise guy's tip wasn't so readily forthcoming.

Sometimes Lucifer carried their markers. These were items toward which the gamblers, usually seated in front of a depleted stack of chips, would profess a deep sentimental attachment. They were rabbit's feet, cat's-eyes, souvenir bullets dug out of old gunshot wounds—apparently anything would do. One character at a rummy table offered the lesser half of a wishbone; another yanked a dogtooth out of his grimacing head, spitting gobs of blood onto the floor. Then the markers were dutifully carried to fat men eating ribs in airless back rooms. (Rooms even farther back than the back rooms were where the gambling took place.) The fat men would in turn, and according to the reputation of the man who'd sent the token, either grumble, spit, or flick ashes, which meant to get lost. Or else they would hand over a wad of grease-stained bills.

That's how it was that I got to see the Monarch Club of evil repute. “This a bad luck house where the boss man get put on the spot bout oncet a week,” Lucifer had informed me, making a revolver out of his forefinger and thumb. “Putty soon ain't nobody be boss less they dead already, livin mens need not apply. See that skillethead over by the do?” He pointed toward an obsidian gorilla in a double-breasted suit. “Tha's Big Six the take-off man, like to mess with folks' bones an he ain't no doctah. So ugly he hurt yo feelins, now don't he?”

If he was trying to scare me, then all right, I was scared. What else was new? But I was also glad that he'd begun to take the time to talk to me. I was glad that he remembered I'd come along, even if it was only to remind me of the terrible, sinister places we were in. Besides, had I decided to break and run—which I confess that I was once or twice inclined to do—I would have been on my own again. And the thought of facing the street all alone, now that I'd gotten used to the cover of their company, made me stick even closer to the twins.

When he realized that I wasn't going anywhere, Lucifer eventually began to drop the scare tactics. Then he was anxious, in his proprietary manner, that I shouldn't overlook the classier features of a nightclub's decor. “Ain't nothin can compare this side a King Keedoozle commode!” he'd boasted as we entered the Club Panama, waving a hand that took in brass rails and leather banquettes, a fairy ring of lights around the dance floor. There was a raised bandstand where the soloist for the Rhythm Hounds, a lady horn player in a gown like an aluminum rain barrel, had been brought to her knees by her own shrill signature. People at the tables jerked and squirmed as if the music were running loose in their clothes. They hallelujahed as the lady unbent her high note and allowed it to dissolve in the air. Then it seemed that the music had vaporized into the lavender smoke that hung over the green gaming tables at the rear of the room.

As the night wore on, Lucifer became ever more expansive, as if he'd made a decision that nothing should be lost on me. The sights that had been previously supposed to inspire fear now seemed to serve only for my enlightenment. In Pee Wee's Saloon, bobbing his head in time, he called my attention to an upright piano: “This what you call the hesitashum beat, an tha's the very bar it own self where Mistah Handy done first writ down the blues”—indicating it the way my grandfather might have pointed toward Sinai.

On top of the bar, in the absence of Mr. Handy, a kiss-curled tootsie was lifting her dress to bang together cymbal-clad knees. A dusty crowd was milling about in the acid yellow light, some dancing a slow drag near the piano, others clustered around the bumpered crap tables. These tables, as Lucifer (like a flea in my ear) divulged confidentially, could be converted to billiards the second that the cops arrived. By the same token, the roulette wheel became a clock on the wall, and the lottery barrel a canary cage. In fact, the whole place was fraught with contrivances that instantly transformed the furniture from its felonious purposes back again to innocence. Which was maybe why Pee Wee's was also known as the Garden of Eden.

There was a portrait on the wall of a giant Negro with a head like a polished plum, straddling an angry ocean in which a ship was going down. Again Lucifer: “Tha's Jack Johnson was worl champeen, which the XX
Titanic
have refuse to carry him on board.” Beneath the painting was a bench where a group of old men, several of them amputees, were holding guitars and beat-up cornets like badges of office. These, I was told, were the emeritus musicians whose years on the road had cost them literally an arm and a leg. But as Lucifer assured me: “It don't take but three fanger to play the blues Delta-style.”

Here I would have liked to toss in a tidbit of my own, just to show I wasn't so dumbstruck as some. Unlike the tagalong brother Michael, for instance, I had a mouth. I tried to tell the wise guy that in my own neighborhood there was also a bench. There the old kockers sat in front of another tonsorial parlor, missing digits that the Cossacks had relieved them of long years ago. But before I could finish my footnote, Lucifer was in motion again.

Even on the street he made every minute count. Brazenly he collared members of the colored baseball league strutting in their red-socked uniforms, their cleats on the sidewalk like munching teeth. He stopped the roustabouts and country boys stumbling out of juke joints, pie-eyed from too much temptation. He hooked thumbs in the bibs of their overalls and stood on tiptoe to whisper in their ears. Then they would lick their lips, their eyes waxing banjo, and turn over whatever they had in their pockets. Like sheep they would follow Lucifer and Michael (and Harry!) around the corner and through the portals of the Baby Doll Hotel.

As the designated envoys of their redoubtable Aunt Honey, the wards of the Baby Doll had carte blanche everywhere. And Lucifer, he was a regular Pied Piper of Beale Street. Running with him, I began to feel almost indestructible, like when someone touches the Baal Shem's robe in a holy story. So long as you hung on tight, you could go anywhere; you could travel out of time to paradise. Or you could plunge into the thick of some dank and flyblown hole-in-the-wall, where Lucifer would shout “Western Union!” or any of a dozen variations on “Open, Sesame” to clear the way.

Then we would nudge and shove through an overheated press of stump drinkers, of dancers shaking in the throes of the shimmy-she-wobble. (I was beginning to pick up the lingo.) We crossed floors so sticky with tobacco juice, bellywash, and blood, for all I knew, that they squished like a swamp under the soles of your shoes. I heard hysterical laughter and language that could have wilted flowers. I saw cryptic high signs and tempers at the end of short fuses, a man in a corner fingering the outline of the pistol in his pocket, a woman on a table skirt-dancing herself into a stupor. I saw rose-colored lights illuminating the cavern of a crooner's mouth, his uvula vibrating like the devil's own speed bag. I saw the lights playing off sweat-spangled shoulders and cheeks, saw them flash from a drawn knife blade. In short, I kibbitzed to my heart's content a life that was never meant for my eyes. A life that waited until gentlefolk were safely tucked in their beds before coming out to play.

If anybody looked askance at me or aimed some barbed remark my way, I never noticed. In league with Lucifer, I'd begun to take it for granted that I shared his immunity. Not only did I feel unthreatened, but I'd begun to assume that my presence was as naturally accepted (or ignored) as the twins'. That's why I missed my stride when a gambler in one of the dives, his splayed nose spread like a sand dollar over his face, brusquely called me to his table.

“Hey white folks,” he'd tipped back his chair to ask me, “y'all mind do I rub yo hade for good luck?” After I'd obliged and he'd frowned his dissatisfaction with my hair, that it lacked the fine texture he'd been led to expect from my race, I froze. I groped for an excuse. But before my backbone could turn entirely to jelly, Lucifer was there beside me to set him straight.

“He ain't white,” he was sorry to have to inform the gambler. “He Jewrish.”

After that first night I began to sneak out of the apartment two, sometimes three nights a week. Sometimes I stayed out till the small hours, coming home even later than my father, whose shop was often the last on Beale Street to close. On such nights I would only have time to catch a couple of winks before getting up for school. My teachers—imposing women in durable tweeds, formidable of bosom and tush, “bout six months in front and nine months behind” as Lucifer might have said—were large on discipline. They were ever vigilant, quick to resort to thumping with thimbles and hacking with rulers, to confining you to the purgatorial depths of the broom closet. Nevertheless, though they caught me catnapping with some regularity in my classes, they tended to let it go. I took this as a measure of just how inconsiderable I was in their eyes. Also, while my years in books had marked me for a social nobody among my classmates, they had given me a knack for making tolerable grades. So if my teachers thought anything about me at all, it was probably that I'd been burning the midnight oil.