by Steve Stern
“Bon voyage,” I said to the greasy nickel, which nobody thought was funny. Attempting to take the passenger seat next to Oboy, I stumbled on a bamboo pole that snapped in two. I plunked myself down and scowled to cover my embarrassment.
Putting his back to the task again, the wisenheimer kid gave us a shove and leaped on board. Directly we scraped clear of the asphalt and slid out into the shimmering lagoon, a progress so smooth it stole my breath as if we’d taken flight. I squeezed the paint-peeling edge of the boat, feeling it give under my fingers like cork, and watched the winking hill of pawnshops recede.
Having handed over the paddle to his silent partner, the wise guy plopped down in what had now become the after end of the boat. Producing a wallet-thin bottle from the inside of his coat, he gravely explained, “Doctor order,” as he took a swig. He passed the bottle to Oboy, who chugalugged in a show of good fellowship, then offered what was left of the kerosene-looking liquid to me. I told him no thank you, since the fumes were revolting enough, but he pressed it, saying, “Take jus a lil sweet corn to settle yo nerve.”
I couldn’t tell whether he was taunting me or expressing honest concern, but I supposed it wouldn’t do for the crew to think I was afraid to drink after shvartzers. On the other hand, here we had only just left the shore and already they were trying to corrupt me—and why should my nerves need settling? Come to think of it, I was scared to drink after shvartzers! But God forbid they should discover this and throw me overboard. So, to oblige them, l’chayim, I took a sip.
The breath that I’d only just recovered immediately escaped me. The boiling in my middle released a steam, or so it felt, that threatened to float my head from my shoulders if I didn’t hold on. When I could see again, I checked the back of my hands for excessive hair or any change in pigmentation. Then I held out the bottle to the wise guy, who was nestled against the stern as if for a nap. His tweed cap was pulled down over his brow, jugging his ears, which made you wonder how his arm knew when to shoot out and snatch the shnaps.
“Steady as she go, Mistah Michael.” He continued uttering pointless orders, maybe piloting a ship in his dreams. “Hump that bale, y’ol bullneck Stacker Lee.” Not wanting to rock the boat, I turned around only once, which was when I got my first real look at the other boy. He was facing west, his eyes hooded by the wide brim of a raggedy panama, manning his oar with the single-mindedness of a galley slave.
I told myself that everything was fine. I was anyway only a block, then a block and a half, from my father’s place of business. I was in a soggy boat on a warm spring night with three darkies, sailing east on Beale past the swamped but still illuminated New Orleans Cafe. In order to get to its neon front entrance, the people were having to straddle a bottleneck of rowboats and dinghies, which made them look like they were wearing enormous water-walking shoes. Then we were abreast of a wholesale meat market called Nello’s Tenderloin, its windows, fogged in condensation, displaying headless animals like a warning on a hostile coast. Next came the Snow White Laundry, strung with year-round Christmas lights, bundles tumbling over its fire escape as if dropped from the beak of a stork, caught by children in inner tubes. At the tributary where Hernando Street met Beale, a lady in a window above the Pantaze Drugstore was tossing her garter, drawing such cheers from the boats you’d have thought she’d inaugurated a fleet.
When we’d sailed past those islanded storefronts, out beyond the quicksilver reach of their reflections, I noticed a change in the air. The mild breeze, brackish with the stench of the renegade river, was laced now with the keener odor of barbecued treyf. This, I assumed, is the way that dry land announces itself when you cross a channel at night.
There was a bump and I turned around to bright pandemonium, the skiff having butted against the pavement on the other side. Sprung from his repose, the cheeky kid piped up, “All out for the famous Beale Street”—as if the other end of the street were unfamous, or maybe not Beale Street at all. “The famous Pee Wee,” he continued like an elevator operator, “the One Minute, the Palace The-ay-tah, where the home folk plays the fool and the blues have done first come uptown, the fabulous Gray Mule, the famous Mambo’s Tonsoral Parlor…”
All over the sidewalk and out across the avenue, people were milling and knocking about. They were clapping in time to the unholy racket of a street band playing on washboard basses and gallon jugs, shoving to make room for the gyrations of a pair of young jitterbuggers with rubber knees. The boy in loose trousers, his baseball cap on backwards, was twirling a girl in cardinal red, her glossy legs kicking her dress above frilly cream drawers. One moment they were cheek to cheek, two halves of one snaky sashay; the next she was riding him, a female devil that he tried with mighty shudders to shake off his back. Shvartzers stumbled in grubby shmattes, strutted in glad rags fit to kill: dead foxes with their tails in their teeth, watch chains that dragged the ground, ostrich feathers, boutonnieres, jewels as arresting as stoplights. They rattled tin cups, gnawed neckbones, and flung melon rinds, which hung in the air for an instant like green crescent moons. They smashed jars over the curb and squared off. They hooked arms, squeezed bottoms, slipped hands into each other’s pockets, stabbed ice picks between fingers that were spread over the hood of a sedan. They carried ragged-combed roosters with plumage like an aurora borealis and wicked spurs.
Above the fracas you could hear the odd voice hawking catfish, “Ain’t it yo sweetmeat,” and something called the dreambook, “I’m stone-guarantee will change yo luck.” Somebody offered a cure for heartbreak while another promised the end of days. A caramel-skinned woman in an Alice-blue nightgown, out of her head with pain or delight, drifted past singing a plaintive air about cutting a throat.
Beside me, Oboy nodded like this must be his stop. He stood and delicately hitched up his pant legs before stepping out of the boat, then turned to present the puzzle of himself for me to decipher. One solution was that here was my papa’s employee offering to show me the sights; another was that the wizened little mieskeit was bent on treachery. Having already introduced me to strong drink, he would lead me into more unspeakable types of temptation. He would slip me a mickey and sell me to scoundrels who trafficked in Jewish boys, and I would wake up on a slow boat in chains.
My ears were ringing and my stomach felt like someone was braiding my kishkes into holiday bread. Still, I wanted to get up and show myself ready to take my adventures as I found them, but I couldn’t find my feet. Whatever bravado I’d imbibed from the wise guy’s tonic had evaporated during the passage.
With a sharp jerk or two of his flinty features, Oboy appeared to be taking the measure of me. Then he shrugged as if to show that what I did or didn’t do was a matter of indifference to him, and scuttled off into the thick of things. I watched him sidestep a little street band in clanging competition with the rolling piano in an open door of one of the clubs. Pausing to tip his cap, he actually hoofed it a few sprightly steps; he dropped a coin in a jug and moved on into the crowd, where he ducked under a theater marquee and vanished from view.
I wished I was back in my alcove already, at a safe remove from all of this hell broken loose. I had the distinct feeling that I’d seen more than I was meant to, that I’d violated some unwritten law. When I clenched shut my eyes, the street continued to run amok in my brain. So I turned around on my splintery seat and let the boys know that I was ready to be ferried back.
“Cost you a nickel,” said the kid with the lip, laconic for a change, his infuriating grin echoing the frayed crescent bill of his cap. “Ten cent the round-trip fare.”
I gave him a smirk. Where had I heard this before? It was time to advise him that colored had been lynched for less audacity than his. Their dismembered parts—I had this on my papa’s more or less unimpeachable authority—were mounted for trophies beside the wrestlers’ photos in the barbershop of the Claridge Hotel. But I was beyond striking attitudes. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I would ever see North Main Street again.
&n
bsp; “Look,” I said, turning out my pockets, which were empty but for a key ring and some hamentashen crumbs from a Purim banquet years before. Like a good boy, I’d taken only trolley fare from the till. “I gave you everything I had!” Unimpressed, the boy stepped out of the boat and began to tug at the stem while the other, as if in need of rewinding, sat staring into the lap of his filthy overalls.
I turned over my mind for some straw to clutch at, coming up with only “I’m Harry Kaplan!” Like the lampposts should bow down. “You know, Mr. Solly the pawnbroker’s son. My IOU is good!”
Standing practically astride the silent oarsman, the cheeky kid cocked his head. He allowed his grin to contract to a thoughtful pucker, then turned up the bill of his cap to give me the once-over.
“You Mistah Solly boy?” he asked, still apparently unconvinced, though I was nodding for all I was worth. “Do you be Mistah Solly boy, I speck you can say where he keep his lil Natchez boat which it sets in a lightbub.”
There was no end to the kid’s impertinence. Having failed at extortion, he now wanted to wheedle out of me the whereabouts of my papa’s most coveted junk. Of course I didn’t believe for a second that Kaplan’s held any serious allure for thieves, but if I’d thought it would help get me out of here, I’d have drawn him a blueprint.
“Top shelf on the end nearest the windows,” I fired back, “next to his General Lee in a milk-glass bladder.”
“Where Mistah Solly keep his traption make gold out a belly lint and such?”
“His alchemistry set? Under the counter in his patentless inventions bin,” I answered confidently. I was ready for anything he might throw my way, oral exams having always been my strong suit. But just as I was warming to the quiz, it seemed to be over.
“You ain’t say no thin don’t every mother son awready know.”
So how could you win? “I’m his son all right!” I shouted, turning my head in profile, the better to show off the distinctive Kaplan beak. “Have a look.”
The kid made a slow appraisal. “Do kinda favor the man.”
“Favor? Are you blind? Like two peas in a pod.”
“I wudn a put it izzackly like that,” he said, leaving me to imagine just how he might have put it. But then he gave a little chuckle that sounded like assent. “Mis-tah Sol-ly boy. Well, it am sho nuff a small worl. My, my, Michael”—he thumped the crown of the other kid’s hat—“don’t it jus beat all? What you think, this here be Mistah Solly boy. I got to say it, yo daddy he been good to colored folk. Done give me fitty cent one time for a ol Mason fez, which I tell him it belong to a African kang.” He added with a kind of wistful satisfaction, “I drops by his shop after hour now and then just to shamooze.”
I gave silent thanks that my father’s reputation for a soft touch had preceded me in these parts. The Kaplan name seemed to have some real currency down here, philanthropic associations even. I felt almost like an ambassador.
“I please to make yo quaintance, Mistah Harry did y’all say?” the wise guy went on, doffing his cap which a couple of coins fell out of. He had a large, topheavy head the shape of an eggplant stood on end. His hair was an itchy-looking mat of black fleece like a field tilled by a runaway plow, and his ears, even without the pressure of his cap, looked like handles. “Name Lucifer,” he submitted huskily. Before I had time to beg his pardon and make sure that I’d heard him right, he once more unzipped his showy grin. “And this be my goodest one an only sweet brothah Michael.”
He removed the other kid’s hat the way a waiter uncovers a dish, exposing a head shaped identically to his own, though completely bald. He had deep scooped hollows at his temples, the brother, as if he’d been dragged out at birth with a pair of ice tongs. He had lips like a bagel and a slack and brooding jaw. But his eyes, glancing up at me an instant before turning inward again, were every bit as lustrous as Lucifer’s.
Defensively, as if he knew what I must be thinking, the wise guy was quick to inform me, “He ain’t no dummy, he jus never speak.” Then he restored both hats to their respective heads, giving his brother’s a pat for good measure, and proudly folded his arms. It was a pride suggesting that more had been revealed than just their names. And when it was clear to him that I had no idea what he was getting at, he swelled his chest, this Lucifer, announcing in a voice which implied that any ninny could see, “We is twin.”
At this point things began to happen fast. A large man in an oilskin coat with a flat mud pie of a face pitched toward us from out of the crowd. He loomed over Lucifer, demanding that we separate our booties “lickry-spit” from his skiff. Without even turning to inspect the menace, Lucifer stepped nimbly over his brother, who, reactivated, wasted no time in digging in with his oar. In seconds we were embarked and Lucifer was lounging with his back against the gunnel, his hands folded comfortably behind his head.
“Dead folk,” he remarked with a philosophical detachment, directing my attention to the dwindling hubbub behind us, “they gon be jump around like that on Jedgment Day. Mr. Handy come back and solid blow his horn.”
I told him I would have to take his word for it. All of a sudden it seemed important that I shouldn’t be thought of as dull company. “So this is a typical Friday night, or what?” I inquired.
Lucifer drew back and let go a sound like surf. “Shhhoot, you ain’t seed nothin. Oughta see it round Jubilee time. People dance the dark rapture start-bone-nekkid, lovin and killin in the street, so low-down jookin the Lawd hissef cain’t look. They be steady carryin em from the Monarch to the meat wagon all night long.” He leaned forward to become more confidential, turning briefly aside to swat a rat trying to crawl on board. “But this what you see ain’t the real famous Beale Street. The famous Beale done been long gone before our time.”
I didn’t think it was exactly his place to assume that his time and mine were the same, but given the circumstances, I wasn’t complaining. In fact, I felt almost happy to be included. That’s when it first occurred to me, as the kid rattled on, offering me another sip from his flask, that Lucifer and I must be about the same age.
“In them day you had the river nigger eight foot tall. You had yo barrelhouse got roof shangle made a silver dollah, got a whooskey spigot shape like a golden catfish. You had them gambler would carry a hoodoo walkin stick an fight a duel with a blindfold on. When they done the dirty dozen drag-style, they be known to spit pison. You had them fancy womens wearin unders made a orange blossom, wear a snake hold they stockin up. Wear kiss-my-kitty perfume—one whiff, it a turn a chile to a man in a minute flat. You had yo conjure mens that would swallah a live lamparee…”
Absorbed in his litany, Lucifer didn’t seem to notice—when we’d sailed past the smoldering beacons of Handy Park, figures moving among them who looked several parts smoke themselves—that we’d bumped against the mercantile end of the street. But as anxious as I’d been to get back across the lagoon, all of a sudden I wasn’t in any hurry to leave the skiff.
“… You had a bush preacher would Injun-rassle the debil,” droned Lucifer, “had a green-eye root woman turn the preacher to a pissant…”
Finally I snapped out of it and asked myself what I thought I was doing. Clambering to my feet, I told them, “Excuse me, but this is where I get off.”
I wobbled a bit in an effort to get clear of the boat, my sea legs slow in readapting to dry land. Then I straightened up and tried to inject into my voice a note of dauntless chutzpah, the kind that this Lucifer (such a name!) was so proficient at. Jerking my thumb over my shoulder to distinguish between the honorable edifices behind me and that bedlam across the lagoon, I declared, “This Beale Street is famous enough for me!”
Lucifer was now standing in the bow of the skiff, arms folded admiral-wise. His saucy grin, nearly eclipsing his face, did a fair impersonation of the sickle moon and hinted that the joke was somehow on me. At that moment, as there were no waiting passengers, the close-mouthed brother started to shove them off again.
“Wait a minute!�
�� Having had such an earful of this so-called twin, I might have a thing or two to say for myself, though for the life of me I couldn’t think what. Still, they shouldn’t be in such a hurry. Did I need to remind them of the oilskin man, who was probably waiting for them now on the other shore?
But Lucifer had already dropped his grin (which I half expected to see subsiding beneath the dirty water) and put on a strictly business face.
“Y’all can bring us yo nickel tomorrah,” he called as they drifted out among the other boats. They had merged with a shadow fleet, outlined by ripples like a storm of phosphorescent butterflies that left only a boat-shaped silhouette where the skiff had been. “This here a moonlightin operation.” Lucifer’s voice, grown thinner among a chorus of others, still carried across the glimmering soup. “Daytime come, find us at Mambo Tonsoral. I’se a shine…”
This is where a terrible sinking feeling overtook me. Turned around is what I was, discombobulated—a Moishe Kapoyr, as my grandpa might have said. I was a stranger at my papa’s own end of the street, while at the same time, by some topsy-turvy logic, belonging where I had no business to be. “Man overboard,” I exhaled in a whisper that aspired to a shout. I felt that the twins had as good as left me marooned. Years would pass: my hair and beard would grow rank and twined in garbage. I would grub for roots and vermin, and light vain signal fires with the shreds of my bar mitzvah suit.
Then I looked around toward the pawnshops and slapped my own cheeks. I took several deep breaths, counting hup-two, alef-bais-gimmel, placing one foot in front of the other until I began to get my bearings again.
Five
Naturally I had no intention of taking a nickel to the twins or, for that matter, ever returning to the famous end of Beale Street again. It was no place for anybody who valued his peace and quiet, not to mention his mortal gizzard. Besides, didn’t I know where I was better off? These days I was content just to hang around the pawnshop. Customers aside, it was entertainment enough just to watch my papa performing his monkeyshines.