Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (20 page)

“In this one the star-crossed lovers”—and she paused to savor the phrase—“they don't even know what the other one looks like. See, they can only meet in the dark…”

The more volumes she tried to unload on me, accompanying them always with some tempting snatch of narrative, the more embarrassed I became by her generosity. Never mind that the books, most of which had already seen action enough, were destined for such an unkind end. Where they were going, Naomi's treasures would be brutally cracked open, their contents devoured, leaving only their unrefundable shells for me to return. Besides, my arms were so stretched from the mounting heap, which I held clamped in the vise of my chin, that I thought my shoulders would pop from their sockets.

“Uncle already!” I cried, hoping that by accident I hadn't roused the lord of the house. But my plea fell on deaf ears.

Having substantially pruned the bookshelves, Naomi was now on her knees beside the four-poster, plundering her cache of lurid jackets.

“I think you're gonna like this one,” she teased, “and this one, ayayay!” It was her version of hard sell.

I was a little disappointed to see that, among her hidden volumes, there were no such titles as
Betty's Petticoat Nights
. Instead, they were mostly novelized versions of movies of the day, with cover portraits of Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford in dishabille. Nevertheless, after the hidebound standards of her formal library, you'd have thought Naomi might be ashamed to haul out such junk. But what was apparent was that for my cousin, be it high literature or cheap romance, a story was a story. Rather than presenting them like tawdry secrets, Naomi seemed to bring out the books with pride. She looked like someone who'd finally gotten around to spring cleaning, clearing away her stuffy volumes to make room for these bright novelettes.

“You'll die when you read this one,” she was impishly promising. “There's this girl with red hair and—you know vilder moid? I mean, this girl is wild…”

“Naomi, shah! I already got more than I can carry.”

“… No man can hold her, she gives them all the slip, keeps running off to join the Ziegfeld or the Gold Rush or…”

Unable to clap my ears, I shut my eyes, shaking my head so vehemently that I chafed my chin on the grainy top of my stack.

“But it's only light reading,” she urged.

“No more!” Peering at her over the books, I gave my cousin a look that was meant to convey my profoundest obstinacy.

That's when she started to shrink again. Before my eyes she was turning back into the old Naomi, the one I could do without. The one with the wounded-doe weepers and the eternally quivering lower lip. She was sitting cross-legged on the fluffy pink carpet in the shadow of a leaning tower of books, which I had half a malicious mind to let topple back into her hands—idle and quiet as they now were in the lap of her skirt. Then it seemed to me that I had done precisely that. Though I still held the books, I felt that I had somehow dumped my ballast in her lap, then risen into the air. I was watching my cousin grow smaller as I helplessly drifted away in a balloon.

“When you finish those,” she was saying, her voice becoming faint and almost out of earshot, “you're welcome to come back for some more.”

“Thanks a million,” I muttered, resisting the impulse to shout down to her. “Maybe I'll do you a favor sometime.”

Maybe one day I would tell her of the humanitarian service she'd rendered, how her books had been placed in the hands of the needy, who tore them asunder in the name of higher literacy. I would explain how, even while she'd endured such exemplary sitzflaysh in her garden, she had been instrumental in helping me pull off a conspiracy. Then she would understand it was not for nothing that she'd parted with her precious cargo. But just now Naomi looked to be completely out of reach, and I'd done all the favors I had it in me to do for one day.

Just because I'd had to go to such lengths to keep up my part as librarian didn't mean I still wasn't having fun. Since my father seemed to have forgotten all about grooming me for his successor, my association with the pawnshop was no more than nominal. Nowadays I considered myself an apprentice confidence artist or an aspiring “sweet man,” which is a kind of outlaw shadchen who makes matches at hourly rates. I had begun to take a studious interest in Lucifer's so-called errands, though it was often difficult to distinguish between the official ones and the ones he'd trumped up for a lark. Business and pleasure were such near relations, by his lights, that you could almost have called them twins. In any case, these errands involved such a variety of destinations that we were never at a loss for excitement or for excuses to make expeditions beyond the immediate vicinity of the Baby Doll Hotel.

On the strength of a whispered complaint from one of the ladies, for instance, we might be sent after graveyard dirt, popularly known as goofer dust. This, along with certain bodily discharges and the bones of black cats—not to mention the gris-gris made from the devil's dandruff and imported from New Orleans—was an essential ingredient in recipes for casting spells. To get it we would make a moonlit trek to the potter's field behind the bayou, where Lucifer maintained that the twins' mama was buried. This was a pretty safe bet, since the weathered wooden markers bore only numbers instead of names. (Not that it would have mattered, since Aunt Honey—the only available source of information concerning their birth—never managed to recollect the same surname for the brothers twice. As for their mother's given name, it was sometimes Junipurr, occasionally Beulah Love or Nectarine. Their father was always John.) Also, I noticed that Lucifer seldom led us to the same grave site, that it varied according to his disposition like odds in a policy game. Nevertheless, he took every least occasion to steer us through the lot, never failing to place some dandelions or a sprig of chicory on a grave.

Another place where it was said you could find the really vintage dirt was across the river at the old slave burial ground on President's Island. One night in a “borried” johnboat, with both brothers paddling furiously while I bailed with a coffee tin, we actually attempted the rough passage. Before the current turned us back, we saw how the cemetery had been desecrated by the flood. How the high water had performed a kind of postmortem emancipation, robbing the graves of their rotting cypress caskets, setting them free in a bobbing skeleton fleet.

Sometimes we might be sent to the root doctor after the cure for a lady's ailment, such as the bedevilment or the piss-out-of-a-dozen-holes disease. We might be sent after the remedy for having swallowed (as they say) a watermelon seed. Frequently we were endowed for these journeys with some article sacred to the lady in question: an unlaundered intimate garment or the flap of a boyfriend's union suit, materials that would be useful in the manufacture of an effective medicine mojo. Then we would set out through the quarter east of Mambo's, past Wellington, into what Lucifer called the rat cellar of Beale Street. That's where you saw the dogtrot shacks in their barren garden plots, the fallen chimneys and tilted pump handles like buried saber hilts. You saw neolithic chassis stranded on cinder blocks, eroded vertical landscapes of crazy quilts, children peeping out from under barrel lids. You saw children wearing croker sacks like cocoons they couldn't shed.

The root doctor, Washington Legba A-men by name, lived alone in a rattling antebellum mansion at the farthest reach of Beale. The house, along with several others still standing, had been abandoned, according to Lucifer, during the plague of the yellowjack: “Which it ain't actual oughta be call yallah, cause what I'm hear, you will tend to ejackalate black.” As the wise guy had it, these ancestral residences, after the flight of their wealthy owners, had been taken over by colored who were naturally immune to your buckra infirmities. For a time, in fact, the shvartzers had actually run the city. They'd taken over the ghost hotels and worked miracles in the madhouses and hospitals. They'd worn opera hats and suede gloves, occupied box seats at the dogfights and the Piscoble church. In the evenings they'd roasted pheasants over the pyres that burned the cracker victims of the plague. Then the epidemic had ended and the quality folk returned to find the Negroes whistling somewhat smugly in their rags.

But some of the richest never came back to reclaim their estates. Their once palatial houses fell into disrepair, and those at the far end of Beale Street in particular became the frequent subject for tales of weird goings-on.

Dr. A-men could usually be found tending his herb patch or manipulating the colored glass bottles on his bottle tree. These he arranged the better to catch, as I understood, the energy of the spheres. (It was an activity that bore a certain resemblance to one of my grandfather's pastimes, rearranging the branches on mystical diagrams of the Tree of Life.) At other times Dr. A-men might be out under the stars, digging in the earthworks surrounding his tumbledown house. Using a coiled coat hanger with a rag tip dipped in magnetic sand, a device he called a treasure witch, he'd divined that the original occupants had buried a fortune somewhere on the grounds. So far, however, his bewildering complex of ditches had turned up nothing but more bottles and animal bones. These latter he'd put to good use, grotesquely reconstructing them, turning the interior of his trash-appointed mansion into a museum of monsters.

Whenever the doctor saw us coming, he perfunctorily tipped his beaver hat, revealing a head like a scorched kettle. There were cracks in the kettle that became eyes and a mouth when he spoke, then reverted back to cracks when he was silent. After he'd heard our request, he would ask us to kindly excuse him while he repaired to his “elabbatoy.” We would follow him anyway as far as a vine-tangled porch, then look through a window into a room that had seen better days, where ladies had probably entertained suitors, and fathers informed errant sons they were being disowned. There we'd see Dr. A-men poking around among his bones and the jugs that sprouted tubes like curling copper smoke.

We would be back waiting in the yard when he returned with some inky decoction or a root shaped like a pair of frog's legs. Making great claims for the medicinal properties of the article to hand, he might declare: “This one give me by the bad news Right Reverend Razzpeeyutin, who done had it off his longtime ladyfrien Joan a Arc, who done got it direckly from the man a the hour, that am to say his ramblin majesty High John de Conqueroo.”

Once, at the behest of Ringworm the gambler, who tipped us papershell nuts with dimes inside, we carried a message to a hoochie-kooch dancer in Professor Miller's All-Mahogany Revue. From a catwalk in the wings of the Palace Theater, we watched their glittering precision; we counted aloud the propeller revolutions of the tassels on their tushies, and applauded the way they dispatched with uniform high kicks the customers who tried to climb on stage. We stuck around for the amateur segment and heard one of a series of comics called Kokomo claim that his wife was so fat he had to hug her on the installment plan, so ugly that when she went to the zoo the monkeys paid to see her. But the audience shouted his punch lines before he could get them out, and the tummler, known as the Lord High Executioner, wearing a leopard-skin toga and waving a revolver, chased him off the stage. Then came a sister act announced as everybody's favorite pair of canaries, Mercy and Circe the Café au Ladies, who proceeded to argue over the order of their songs. They were followed by a hypnotist who caused an apparently prim volunteer from the audience to hike her skirt and grind her hips to a rolling drum. There was an infant billed as a tap-dancing prodigy, who turned into an evangelist once he'd mounted the boards, and had to be carried off by the seat of his pants. There was a magician so unpopular that his mere appearance provoked a hail of rotten vegetables.

Several times we'd been sent out to hunt some missing novice who'd run away in a cold-footed funk from the Baby Doll. On those occasions Lucifer had judged that the likeliest place to look for the girls was at the picture show. Duck-walking past the box office of the Orpheum Theater on Main Street, we would steal up into the “nigger heaven” gallery. In the lofty darkness just under a ceiling hung with gilded fruit, we'd plop down in half a dozen laps before finding vacant seats. That's how, during a period of late-night detective work, we saw the tail end of
The Invisible Man, Captain Blood
, and
Snow White
. We'd seen a midnight double bill in its entirety
(Gunga Din
and
Lives of a Bengal Lancer)
, and a vaudeville troupe that featured Eddie Cantor, before Lucifer had admitted that we might be barking up the wrong tree.

We saw Bessie Smith, to whom Lucifer allowed a degree of famousness beyond his ordinary use of the word. He said she had a voice whose pitch could break your glasses or cut diamonds; it could set your rinktum free. She was coming out of the Club Panama, wearing a peacock plume headdress and a gown made of mirrors. Surrounded by gaping admirers, who were reflected in the gown, she looked like she was decked out for the evening in the myriad faces of Beale.

Carrying unpaid hotel tabs into the rooms behind the Chop Suey House, we saw men lolling like tent caterpillars in a network of crisscrossed hammocks. We got silly breathing smoke that smelled of burnt rubber and sour cream. At the forge on Vance Street we saw the blacksmith playing his bottleneck guitar for a white man, who kept mopping his brow and boasting, “I told them I'd go as far as Hades for the genuine goods.” Then he would tap the microphone to make sure that the song—about the failure of a key to fit a certain keyhole—would not be lost. We saw a local undertaker sitting defiantly astride a man lying face-down on the sidewalk, his shirt slashed to red spaghetti.

“Ol Hylo,” the undertaker had offered to explain to one and all, “he been kilt now three, fo time, but it look like this one here done took. I ain't be cheat outta his funeral airy again.”