Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (3 page)

It was all an act to prove the shopworthiness of his new public personality—that's how I saw it. It was a performance that, for the purposes of authentication, required an audience. And since his customers had to be counted as more or less a part of the act, this was where I came in. So you had to hand it to him, my stagy papa—he could certainly talk a good pawnshop. Nor did I ever see him as fragile at Kaplan's as he'd appeared that afternoon when he recruited me from North Main. But who did he really think he was kidding? When it came to real life, Kaplan's Loans had more in common with make-believe.

Sometimes, if I got fidgety enough, I might be moved to take a little initiative. I might wave a feather duster over the greentinged glass of a display case or the battered bell of a trombone. This earned me the attention of my papa's puller Oboy, who once or twice had left his post in front of the shop to instruct me in the use of dry mop and broom. Clearly not delighted with my presence on the premises, the runty little shvartzer tolerated me with a stiff impatience. It was apparently more than his job was worth to have to put up with the unskilled likes of such as me.

A legacy (as Uncle Morris put it) from the previous owner, the pint-sized Oboy sat astride a tall, three-legged stool on the sidewalk outside Kaplan's Loans. His pinched face, hatched with deep wrinkles like ancient characters on muddy parchment, was perpetually deadpan in the shadow of his nautical cap. The other pullers on Beale Street were smooth-talking jokers in eye-catching outfits who would accost a potential customer just short of assault. They would detain him on the pretext of, say, scrounging a dip of snuff, then hustle him into the shop for some bargain reserved for his exclusive patronage. But not Oboy, who kept mostly mum.

If he spoke to me at all, it was in brief, gnomic utterances, nuggets such as: “It ain't a flo wax mo better'n elbow grease.” This kind of advice he croaked in a froggy voice whose tone I didn't think he should have taken with the boss's son. So maybe he resented the way I'd begun to usurp some of his duties—not that I could even have told you what his duties were, since they were every bit as vague as my own. Resentful or not, you'd have thought from the way he behaved that I was distracting the puller from more pressing concerns.

He sat on his stool like a watcher in a crow's nest instead of a professional shmoozer there to entice the passers-by. In his lumpish rigidity he put me in mind of a stone monkey in front of the ruined temple described in
The Lost Jewels of Opar
. He was more like the guardian of the shop than its employee.

And I was the license that Papa'd required to abandon himself entirely to the ritual of running his pawnshop. To the bizarre items of merchandise that had begun to fill his shelves, my father now gave his undivided attention. The only reason I didn't feel more out of place was that my afternoons in Kaplan's weren't so dissimilar from afternoons in my alcove above North Main. Nestled under a musty rack of topcoats that hung in the plate-glass window, I would bury my nose in a book. Virtually concealed from the rest of the shop, I made myself at home, though the noisy procession of customers, which seemed to increase by the day, put even my powers of concentration to the test.

En route to some volcano island on board a shanghaied junk, for instance, I might be rudely recalled to Beale Street by the chimes over the door. I might get sidetracked by some colored tailor in fire-engine-red suspenders, boasting the magical properties of a broken sewing machine. Or some blowsy, russet-faced auntie, hitching up several layers of skirts to detach a homemade wooden leg, explaining as she clunked it over the counter, “I be's tired but it still want to dance.”

So maybe I liked the business of furtively parting the coat-sleeves, like leaves in a hunter's blind, to spy on a gambler twirling a key chain. Observing without being observed, I would watch as the gambler grinned hugely so that my father could appraise the diamond set in his gold-capped tooth.

“An unusual cast for a solitaire,” said Papa, making professional noises that who could believe. “Seriously flawed in the center, but the crown facet—oy, what a fire!”

Later on I might watch him give the nod to a hearing trumpet posing as the speaker on a gramophone. He'd make a “hmmm” like a sage physician as he assessed an asthmatic squeezebox, a telescope with a missing lens, a set of worm-eaten Indian clubs, or a pin-bristling voodoo figurine. If ever Papa objected to an item's quality or questioned its authenticity, it was only for the sake of form. Take the case of the crooked old party with the patent-leather face who came in proclaiming, “This am the riginal same coat whooch I wo when the marsah have made I'n the wife to jump over the broom.”

“Uncle Joshua!” Papa clucked his tongue as he fingered the tatty material. “What you're hocking is you're hoken a tchynik.” But he took the coat anyway, in appreciation of its sentimental, if not historical, value, while the old man stood blinking as if the Yiddish for bunkum was a gentle rain in his face.

From the amount of worthless merchandise that he so indiscriminately took in, you'd have thought Sol Kaplan was running a junk shop instead of a loan. He was becoming the curator of a seedy dime museum, of a sort that even P. T. Barnum wouldn't have been caught dead in. On the other hand, I'd begun to think I wasn't the only member of the family who was a pushover for a good story.

Because Kaplan's Loans was turning into a regular clearinghouse for tall tales, its proprietor swapping cold cash for the moonshine that his clientele carried in. The rusty weapons and nameless musical instruments, the two-headed sheep embryos in pickle brine, the Rube Goldberg inventions, the homespun clothes, the encyclopedias eighty years out-of-date—they were merely thrown in for good measure. They were mementos of the exotic places the stories came from, places that lay, by my reckoning, somewhere to the east of Third Street in a district that had begun to arouse my interest, though I didn't let on. While my father continued to pretend that he was a serious pawnbroker, I kept on pretending to read.

The rains came to Beale Street at approximately three in the afternoon on a Saturday toward the end of March, after an unseasonably muggy couple of days. I recall that I was busy for a change, assisting Papa in the never-ending inventory of his stock. This was how he occupied himself in the interludes between customers: he checked and rechecked the merchandise that he already had almost by heart, cross-referencing recent acquisitions against the ever more elaborate entries in his multiplying account books. From the high solemnity with which he called the roll of his purchases, he might have imagined himself a recording angel. He was judging what did and did not belong (what didn't belong?) to his kingdom come of vintage junk.

As usual he was taking his time, incapable of citing a flatiron or a butter knife without relating all he knew of its intimate history. It fell to me to hold the ledgers, entering any new additions and correcting him on the rare occasions when his memory was imprecise.

“Item,” he would pronounce, a forefinger lifted as if to test the wind, “one pair of trousers, gray worsted with shiny seat, custom-made by Mose the tailor for the world's first colored millionaire. This is the one that helped finance Mr. Crump's campaign before Mr. Crump had him run out of town.” Or, “Item, one shotgun with sawed-off barrel, once owned by Jake ‘the Milk Snake' Miller, a protégé of Machine Gun Kelly, Memphis's own native son. His poor mama that don't look so good was in just this morning with this item, one silk camellia in cracked bell jar, once worn behind the ear of…”

A new entry, this one required my taking dictation, something to do with a lady singer in some legendary somebody's legendary band. “Do I have to write all of it down?” I asked, though of course I knew better than to ask. But hadn't I humored him enough for one day?

Papa peered at me sharply, allowing his glasses to fall from his forehead and travel down his rostrum nose. This meant that he was shocked by my lack of manners, that I should have interrupted him at his holy office. It was about as far as he ever went in the way of expressing displeasure.

I sighed wearily and rolled my eyes toward the window, where Horatio Hornblower was gathering dust on the sill under the rack of coats. That's when I saw how the world beyond the window, as if to second Sol Kaplan's annoyance, had turned to darkest midnight in the middle of the afternoon. The sidewalks stood eerily vacant of weekend strollers, the dead-silent streets keeping the secret of where they had gone. The bass throb of my heart began a countdown that reverberated in my ears. Then it came, like a sound you might hear when an ocean liner collides with an iceberg. It was the sound of the sky cracking open.

What followed was a tropical deluge such as you'd live a long time without seeing in Brighton Beach. It was a storm so furious that I expected the swaying lampposts to be uprooted at any moment and blown away. Even the immovable Oboy, who'd braved the squall's initial force with the resignation of a ship's figurehead, had at last to surrender and carry his stool indoors. Then, for an indefinite time, the three of us stood in the window, having shoved aside the hanging coats to watch the rain come down.

Sometimes it fell at a slant like a hail of arrows; sometimes it was whipped by an angry gale into a frenzy of beaten sheets. The plate glass would shudder its accompaniment to the thunder, the branched lightning performing its sudden alchemy, and for a split second the shopfronts were transfigured into a solidgold replica of themselves—a commemorative coin of a storm-ravaged street stamped white-hot into my mind.

The gutter backed up and foamed like a boiling moat; it ran with white water carrying fish heads and fruit rinds, a tape measure, a whisk broom, a terrified cat with its talons fastened to a whirling picture frame. Other things flashed by too fast to identify, nondescript objects fallen out of the burst bellies of clouds. There were items that scooted in flight down the pavement with no assistance but the wind: a potted rubber tree overtaken by flapping newspapers escorted by a rolling barrel hoop, an empty rain cape wrestling with the turbulent air. Meanwhile the awning along the front of the shop had filled with rain like a berth, spilling over until the interior of Kaplan's was a cave behind a waterfall.

I don't know how long we stood there watching. How could I when there was no distinguishing night from day, and the clocks in the shop, if they worked, were all set at random times? Eventually the storm seemed to have spent its original violence, subsiding into a persistent, still relatively savage downpour. At some point the power had failed, and in the darkened shops over the road you could see the flashlights darting like fireflies. Then the flashlights began to go out as the brokers and their help started to emerge. Some dashed madly while others groped with their coats over their heads, scattering in various directions toward home.

The first among us to utter a sound, my papa felt compelled to offer the odd remark: “What do they think, that they're swimming upstream to spawn?” But as the evening wore on with no letup in sight, even Papa had to admit, “Well folks, it looks like business is kaput for the day.”

Still nobody budged. We continued bearing our silent witness to the torrents, listening as the heavy furniture was rearranged on high—while I wondered if my father was thinking what I was thinking: What was to keep us from staying the night in the shop? Honestly, the place had never seemed so snug, especially since Oboy had lit a couple of kerosene lamps. We had plenty of provisions, zwieback crackers and soda and even some salt-cured sidemeat (albeit a little green) that Papa had conceded to make a loan on. We had lamps for reading and hammocks that you could hang and curl up in, like sailors who've come through a typhoon. What was it they said, any port in a storm? I was about to present my case when the telephone rang.

Papa removed the receiver, and I could hear through the static—even from several paces away—the shrill, demanding voice of my mother. She was jabbering about something that my father, holding the phone at arm's length, couldn't have caught any better than I. Nevertheless, after a few moments he interrupted her to assert, “You're so right, Mildred, it's time we came home.” Though once he'd hung up, he was as irresolute as before.

“What do you say we make a break for it?” he submitted at length, with an enthusiasm you could see clear through. “Now's as good a time as any.” He even went so far as to take some umbrellas out of an elephant's hoof, dispensing them as grimly as if they were life jackets. Not that anyone seemed inclined to take the first step toward the door.

“Nu, Oboy?” Papa meant to sound breezy despite a quavering in his voice.

A character of few words, like I said, Oboy could speak volumes with the knitting of his deep-etched brow. “My mama didn't raise no fool” was what he was saying, if I read his configuration of wrinkles correctly. Or did he hesitate because, for all I knew, he had nowhere else to go? Come to think of it, when had I ever seen the pawnshop when the puller wasn't around? Oddly enough it made me nervous, Papa's sending him away—like it might be some violation of the lease.

Nor would it have surprised me if Oboy simply refused to leave, if he had carried his stool back onto the sidewalk and sat there defiantly, taking whatever the weather could dish out on the chin.

But in the end he croaked without an argument, “Yassuh, Mistah Solly, I see y'all tomorrah.” Mindful of opening the umbrella prematurely, he made for the door. As I watched him struggling under a streetlamp like a wirewalker losing his footing, I half expected the stunted puller to be taken aloft. The storm would disperse him over rooftops like a seed. But instead the wind turned his umbrella inside out, tugging him down the sidewalk as if he had a wild thing on a leash.

No sooner was he out of sight, however, than Papa began to dawdle again. From the way he was behaving, you'd have thought he was a captain torn between saving himself and going down with his ship. Stalling for time, he puttered around, transparently jaunty, starting to sing to himself as he oiled his cash register keys.