Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (29 page)

I hit the steel slats of the fire escape with a brain-shuddering
ping-ing-ng
, my legs collapsing under me, knees striking the platform studs, which tore my pants. Frantically I set about taking stock of my broken bones, of which there seemed so far to be none, though my knees could have used a little first aid. “Mistah Harry,” came the voice of patience under pressure, and I looked up to find Lucifer standing a couple of steps below me, offering me his hand. Still somewhat addled from my landing, I thought he wanted to give me an amiable shake, mazel tov on the occasion of having made such a valiant leap. But no sooner had I extended my own hand than he latched on to my arm, and for the umpteenth time that evening—indifferent to my abrasions and before I could even get properly to my feet—the wise guy began to drag me in a blind rush behind him.

Only this time there was a difference: instead of pushing deeper into trouble, we were making good our escape. Realizing this left me silly. It tickled me further that the guests were continuing to hurl abuse, which rained over us as harmlessly as ticker tape. As I banged down the steps behind Lucifer, sliding along the railing on my belly whenever I could, I was seized with uncontrollable laughter.

At the bottom of fifteen ringing flights, a horizontal staircase tipped us gently into the street, where we were discharged like a pair of wobbling dreidels. Even from that far below the hotel roof, you could hear the band cranking up another tune—the old standard “Bye-Bye Blackbird,” if I wasn't mistaken. Then we were beating it down Third Street, the music growing ever fainter, diffusing into the surfy sounds of traffic like an orchestra on a sinking ship.

We didn't slow down until we'd reached an alley off of Gayoso Street, where we practically fell out, winded from our dash. Leaning against a wall, I kept on cackling—between healthy gulps of air—over the amazing handiness of our escape. Now that we were clear of it, the whole episode seemed to have been one colossal hoot. Shvitzing buckets, I tore off my waiter's jacket and began to wipe my face, then cracked up again at the sight of the jacket smeared with black stains.

Bent over, panting, hands braced on his knees, Lucifer resisted joining me in my hilarity. Full of fellow feeling, however, I stepped over and gave him a friendly slap on the back. Instantly he began to whoop it up with an abandon that put my own wheezing laughter to shame. He heaved and quaked, hugging himself to keep from splitting his sides. It took me a minute to understand that this was not a happy noise he was making, that the wise guy was bawling desolately.

“I have done fail!” he cried out at length. “It a judgment on me, I done rurnt what ain't never be fix!” He began to curse himself, striking his forehead with the heel of his hand, increasing the cadence with every name he called. “I'se a mosshead…gator bait…suck-hind-tit…eight rock…momzer…coon!” Then he turned and banged his head against the brick wall. Here, as if he'd decided that this was the ticket, he backed up a couple of paces, about to repeat the process with a running start.

I grabbed him by the belt loop and reeled him in. Flinging my arms around him from behind, I locked my fingers over his chest as I'd seen them do at the banquet. Quite honestly, I was embarrassed for all his carrying-on, not to say revolted by the combination of tears and snot dripping onto my sleeve. Beyond spoiling the fun, he was blubbering so woefully I was afraid I might break down and blubber too.

But I hung on just the same, squeezing with all my might until he stopped trying to pull away. I squeezed the last squeak of caterwauling out of his system, until he'd subsided into hiccupping sobs, then silence. It was almost too easy, Lucifer's surrender, and I wondered why, back before it was finally too late, we hadn't tried the same maneuver on his brother.

Not without a feeling of getting even for all the shoving I'd endured that night, I pushed the docile wise guy in the direction of the Baby Doll Hotel, then made tracks back to North Main Street in record time. I collected my schoolbooks from under a box hedge in Market Square Park and entered the apartment reading aloud from a biology text. I turned my head neither left nor right to see who might be home. Walking straight to my alcove, I made my voice—ad-libbing now about lipids, which I may have confused with limpets—manifestly drowsy. Then I nipped out the window into the nodding mimosa tree.

Back at the Baby Doll, Lucifer had retired to his miserable corner again, and as for Michael, he didn't look quite so beatific anymore. Now, when you looked at him, you might think to yourself: If this is love, kaynehoreh, keep it away from me. His fluttering eyelids were ragged as chewed thumbnails, and his cheekbones, above their deep hollows, had the bleached appearance of old rubber. His body in its dirty nightshirt was an empty hand puppet. For all the tender attentions of the ladies, never mind the adoration of the gawkers, the dummy showed no signs of pulling out of his decline.

His voice, after more than a week's worth of uninterrupted prattle, was reduced to the drone of a tiny faltering motor. Sometimes his visitors had to put their ears so close to him that you'd have thought they were listening for a heartbeat instead of words. But usually he was audible enough, and extravagant as ever in eulogizing his beloved. He stalked her through his relentless imaginings, conceiving whole Baedekers of peoples and places along the way—describing territories that, while they'd certainly never figured in his experience, could neither be accounted for by the breadth of his reading. Such an alphabet soup poured out of him that I sometimes pictured Michael's mouth as a shofar from which tumbled something like the contents of Kaplan's Loans.

He showered his sweetheart with gifts, cloaked her in fabrics and anointed her with scents gathered from the place where Beale Street intersected (let's say) farthest Bong Tree Land. He tracked her into terra incognita, where standard-hung castle walls beetled over sharecroppers' shacks and jungle escarpments were terraced in cotton rows, where the Mississippi Delta flowed into the Sea of Tranquillity. He called upon a legendary lost tribe of hoofers and the devil's brother-in-law to come to his aid, and saints from outside any recognized canon, with names like Ribeye and Mandrake Willie. But necromantic intervention notwithstanding, the erstwhile dummy was often heard to complain that he was losing sight of his queen. These days she seemed to give him the slip at every turn.

It made you want to shake him, especially when you knew what she was made of, and say, “Michael, shmuck, get wise to yourself!” But the more I listened to the kid's sick fancies, the more I believed he was only half mad. The other half was making some kind of a deathbed confession that it would have been a sin to muffle up.

Now that the entire neighborhood had shelled out their hard-earned wages to view him, the spectator business had finally begun to fall off. Moreover, since the kid's voice had lost much of its volume, the gawkers were growing impatient, if not bored, with the trouble it took to hear him. There was also the matter of his physical deterioration, the way his delirium no longer seemed to transfigure his mumbling bones. This everyone found plainly depressing. As a consequence, though never really resigned to the fact that his value as a meal ticket had come and gone, Aunt Honey gave up her promotional activities. She'd settled, along with her ladies, into going through the motions of restoring his health, or at least making him comfortable.

Still, you had the steadfast few who kept coming back. Paying the recently devalued admission fee of a nickel, they bent their heads low as they entered the room. Sometimes they came bearing little offerings—personal photographs, jars of preserves, which lay strewn around the bed alongside the broken books. They brought snacks in grease-stained bags and, since nobody bothered with the time limit anymore, folding chairs. Numbered among these diehards was a blade-thin church sexton, always with a lady's stocking on his head. He sat and dribbled his knee like a bouncing ball, horselaughing and exclaiming, “Tha's a good'n,” as if the dummy were reciting some comical shtick. A stout woman with berries in her hat, who never came without her knitting, would steady her needles from time to time to cup an ear, then proceed at a vigorous clip like she was stitching dictation.

I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing now that Michael's lovesong was failing, its words little more than a rattle. Were they waiting for the final extinguishment of the fever that still lit his blasted features? Or did they think that, after it had consumed his body for kindling, Michael's fever might burn on with an enduring life of its own? It might, once it was no longer confined to the bones of a solitary sick kid, torch the Baby Doll in a bonfire that would spread to the rest of Beale. It would ignite the oily surface of the new lagoon, devour the hill of pawnshops, and advance over those parts of the earth that remained unflooded.

A couple of nights after our Hotel Peabody caper, there was a new wrinkle on the scene—or, rather, a whole sack of wrinkles in the shape of a very old man. In his antiquated getup (celluloid collar and Edwardian serge, beribboned pince-nez) he was seated before a panel of machinery that flickered with tiny bulbs, their orange filaments possibly lit by something predating electricity. He was jotting notes, fiddling with wires, spinning reels that apparently needed cranking by hand. Meanwhile Aunt Honey loomed in the hallway, showing him off.

He was, as she would have us know, an esteemed professor of an unpronounceable discipline from the local Negro college. For a modest sum, which she wasn't too modest to broadcast to her girls, she'd allowed him to install his equipment to the exclusion of any further visitors.

“The fessor here,” she boasted, laying a hand on his brittle shoulder, which appeared to dislocate, “he own put the Baby Doll on the map. Gon prove siren-tific that a nigger have got a soul.”

I squatted beside Lucifer, who had himself been evicted from the sickroom and was slumped on the floor of the hall. He didn't have to say anything, I knew what he was thinking. So why didn't he rouse himself and put his foot through the infernal contraption? But weary, hanging his head like his brain was some ponderous stone, Lucifer didn't seem to be Lucifer anymore. He was so gray about the gills now that, outside the Baby Doll, he would have been hard to recognize. When at last he spoke, you'd have thought he was repeating a hypnotist's suggestion, his voice—even less audible than his brother's—carrying no conviction at all.

“This am the finalest straw,” he said to his feet. He removed his cap and began to massage his patchy scalp, muttering like someone trying to read a barely legible sign. It was high time, was what he haltingly said, for a seat-of-your-britches strategy.

“Just what would you call the Peabody?” I wanted to know.

Beyond taking in any sensible remarks, Lucifer muttered on. He was still stuck on the idea that the queen of the Cotton Carnival's fleshly presence was the only antidote to his brother's ills. Since appeals hadn't worked and kidnap was out of the question, involving as it did such overwhelming technical concerns, there was only one course left open to us: “See, we gots to carry him round where she stay…”

I could imagine what he intended—how we would transport the gibbering Michael on a litter to her ancestral mansion, then abandon him on her colonnaded doorstep for her to find. Or maybe she should come upon him more haphazardly—say, floating in her lily pond. A note would be pinned to his swaddling clothes assuring one and all that despite his damaged appearance he was a gift fit for a queen. The joke had gone far enough. It was time to call a spade, excuse me, a spade.

“Lucifer,” I interrupted him, “what do you think? I mean, what do you really think would happen if Michael ever met his—what was her name? Marvy June?”

But Lucifer only looked at me like any shnook would know. “Why, Mistah Harry,” he said patiently. “Do them meet up, Mistah Harry, she own be b'wootch jus like him. She lie down an die if she ain't be the mystifyin Michael's solid good thang.”

For a split second I was almost taken in. Then I couldn't contain my aggravation anymore. If I'd ever humored the kid, I was sorry, and resolved to make amends.

“You don't believe that!” I accused him, loud enough (I hoped) to penetrate his thick skull. “If you believe that”—I pointed toward the sickroom—“then you're as crazy as he is! If they met up, I'll tell you what she'd do. She'd call the cops is what!”

The first to drop were his tired eyes, followed instantly by the collapse of his puckered chin. Then his shoulders sagged, and had I bothered to blow in his direction, I could probably have crumbled the rest of him like a house of cards. So I guessed that I'd reached him. Of course this was nothing I hadn't seen before; in fact, it was getting to be almost a matter of routine. It was another of his ploys, I suspected, meant to sucker me into feeling sorry for him.

“And don't think I feel sorry for you either,” I was suddenly moved to add, though he was evidently too absorbed in self-pity to hear me.

To look at him, you might have thought that he and his brother were suffering from two unidentical halves of the same disease. It was a case of the draykopf following the dummkopf into hopeless insensibility, unless somebody hurried up and turned him around. Somebody who was wise to the wise guy, cagey enough to pull the leg puller's leg. And just who would you suppose that somebody might be?

Over the whir and click of the professor's machinery, you could still occasionally make out some babbled phrase of Michael's: the lady was trapped in a topaz stickpin on a take-out man's lapel; she was spinning the smoke from Pee Wee's back room into her bridal veil. Inwardly I petitioned the Lord of Grandpa Isador to help me help His servant Lucifer, who, come to think of it, had saved yours truly from dying a bookworm. Then it came to me, a brainstorm, an idea so implausible as to bear the authentic stamp of Lucifer's own peculiar brand of folly.