Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (24 page)

Thus, mumbling and sputtering against the gag of his brother's hand, the dummy was brought to Gayoso Street. He was hauled up three flights and hustled down a stuffy passage into what Lucifer called their crib. He always pronounced the word with a fondness that put you in mind of freshly scrubbed children, tucked in by a fawning watchdog who sat vigil at the foot of their bed. It was an unlikely association, given the airless oppression of their little closet, its water-stained ceiling with the peeled paper streamers glinting with crystals of sap, its solitary window more cardboard than frame.

“Now go ahead on and squawk all you wants, devilment!” said Lucifer upon releasing his brother, thrusting him onto the cheeping springs of a hobbled bedstead.

Although he lay there quite passively, words tore out of Michael's mouth like bats from a cave. There was a sensation of words crashing into the walls and ruffling the funny papers that covered the cracks in the plaster where the laths showed through. They spilled a drawerful of policy stubs and fluttered a pile of already ruined books under the bed. They spun on its thumbtack the photograph that Lucifer claimed was of their father (though the taped-together jigsaw, which included such features as a cleft chin and hair like Cab Calloway's, could have been a composite of several men). While nothing really stirred in that stifling space, least of all the delirious twin himself, still, you had the impression that their flyblown wreck of a room was a casualty of Michael's ferociously broken silence.

“She got to be mine!” he wailed, his limbs spread in limp surrender to the eruption of his mouth. “I'm be struck the dias-ticus side a dumb! I'm be snakebit. Cut a hex in my heart with yo razor, suck the pison, taste like sweet muscatel! 0 get back y'all railhead and heap-a-meat and split-foots ain't got a nose, I be studyin beauty here! Her am the one and only puredee supreme, the realest gospel dove. Done made up by a opostle on a bootleg still, then sprankle her on a cypress knee which it is whittle into a honey gal by sweet Jesus hisself. How we meet up is I strum ol Prospero's starvation box, or do I bust me a jack bottle fresh off a bottle bush, and out she pop. She give me a wish and I wusht I'se a sportin man. I wusht I have win her in a wile craps shoot: thow them bone down Pappy Haddon horn what he got it from a ol-timey knight, and she roll out the other end. Her ain't no bigger'n a minute, bone shakers sayin thow it back, but she fit nice longside the piece in my bull-fiddle case. Ain't two step down the road though, when she start in a ruction: ‘Lemme out this here coffin, I ain't begin!' I open her up in my sankshum round back a Mambo's cause she still ain't have a stitch on. I drown them nits in her wig and rinse her feets, then feeds her on a mess a magnolia in whiskey sauce till she get her growth. I give her a housedress done belong to Hester Prine, rake her hair like you drag a river with serpent toof tine, get back. She light up like a punkin. Be radiatin like a buckshot bucket a moonlight, which I kotch it up in a abalone cistern fo her bath. And she say, ‘Mistah Mighty Fine, y'all have done tickle my mind.' Ain't nobody harm her. Is she conjure by a wootch, be a ivory figgerhead on a glory packet makin downstream fo No Return, I kotch her up on my flyin fish name Bad Lazrus. Is she abduck by the debil, I flag a ride on the damnation train nonstop fo perdition, ride free cause I knows the conductor name a Shine. Get to blazes, I fetch her off a coolin board, raise her up with my juice harp rangement a ‘Ramrod Daddy' and a cordial a ‘Easy Life Numbah Nine.' She sit up and pitch a boogie, hair comin down like the sorghum been tump off the table, say, ‘Mus be Michael, my hot chocolate man.' Do some white folks giant look at her sideways, I'm a mash his ding-dong, poke his eye out with a ugly stick, which it a get me sent up Siberya fo life and the dark day. See me tote round my shaddah like a towsack bout a hundred year. It like to bust my back till Daddy Mention, he have learn me to swang the diamond. I have learn from ol Doc Fustus how to signify a man, make his bowel turn aloose to the tune a ‘No Ways Tired.' He have learn me also to frail a medicine tree, flap them leaves up a chokecherry sermon till I scapes the workhouse in a whirly wind. Be crazeh now, wear a horsetail didee, run with them lawless nigger in the piney wood, till the day come she be waitin on me in the shade. She ain't wear nothin but skivvy, got a halo a candlefly look like Loma Doom, say, ‘I'm a want you is you ain't already spoke for.' She say, ‘Michael, my jelly boy, come squeeze my soul. Squeeze ri-cheer,' she say, ‘through my peekaboo shift,' which I done it till it have get me back on my balance mind. But the nex thing you know I be kotched again, put on a guilloteem, do a chitlin strut when the ax have fall. She colleck my hade in her apron, wear it round her goosy neck tween her dinners like a asafetida bag. Plant it in her yard till it come up a chinkapin, branch be hang with a pair a travelin shoes. Meantime death, it don't take but jes a touch, see, so bimeby I come back from hereafter. I follows a road map give me by the Holy Ghost, wear a suit a flame tuck up in the seat by Herkules. Whoa boy, be magic now, who need a hade? Have a owl wang, a rooster spur, a monkey tail I have win playin coon can with Natty Bumpo in pa'dise. Got High Johnny's sangin lodestone and lightnin in a jar. Y'all have hear them song bout how the rascal Michael, he done rassle a walkin windmill. He have bushwack a posse a Ku Kluxers, make em pull off they sheet say uncle, he say don't call me uncle. Make em pull off they sheet, they turn out to be angel, say, ‘That honey gal done belong to you.' Then I swear, can I find her, she sho nuff gon have my chile. Cept it ain't be no yard chile, got Jane Airs fo a midwive and Jesus' mama too, so the chile a be golden…”

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.