by Steve Stern
What I’d been prepared to see, I saw: a cavern of topaz light inhabited by languid mermaids. Then I blinked and a tawdry room appeared. It was a room that hadn’t decided whether to be an exotic harem or a more or less respectable parlor, and so made halfhearted pretensions toward each. There were cheesy chintz draperies through which the sunlight was sifted into a fine brown dust, brass cuspidors anchoring the corners of a woven carpet, floor lamps covered in veils of red gauze. On top of a cast-iron mantelpiece, framing a gas stove, was a collection of guttering aromatic candles. (They had been poured into the shapes of bearded heads, these candles, their features melted to monstrous stalactites.) There was a neon clock, an enamel Dixie Peach calendar on a water-stained wall, and a portrait of a gimlet-eyed Jesus with a rich golden tan. A footstool supported a phonograph playing a record of what sounded like a tomcat in the rain. Around the phonograph, relaxing in moss-grown armchairs and sunk in a deep-cushioned divan, were several women of dusky hue.
They were wearing kimonos in orchid prints and pastel dressing gowns. Some of the gowns were left carelessly open, revealing silk shimmies and stockings rolled to the knee. One of them, with her crossed leg kicking, her full lips in a pout like a lilac bow, was sniffing powder from a pillbox with a straw. Another, whose buttery bosom was barely contained by a torn lace border, rolled the condensation from a jar of chartreuse liquid round her brow. A yellow girl in a short white slip was kneeling beside the draperies, her wavy ocher hair spread across the wing of a table. Standing over her, a turbaned woman in a skin-tight housedress licked a pinkie to test the heat of the flatiron in her hand. She made a similar gesture with sizzling sound effects as she touched the finger to the curve of her backside. When she put down the iron on the girl’s lush hair, the room was suffused with an odor of burnt oranges.
Meanwhile on the divan, a pair of ladies sharing a single cushion, their arms about each other’s shoulders, made turtledove noises as they passed a pipe back and forth. From its shallow clay bowl rose arabesques of azure smoke, out of which you might imagine that the room had just materialized.
“Frail sustahs, may I have yo undivide tention if you please!” This was Lucifer demanding to be heard, flagging the women with his cap, though not one of them so much as bothered to look his way. “I have the distink pleasure,” he went on undaunted, “of introduce to you Mistah…” He turned toward the dapper client, who only grunted. “Mistah Rather-Not-Say,” christened Lucifer, “a traveler in notion what tooken a notion to sample y’all wares.”
He grinned in appreciation of his own turn of phrase and, his mission apparently accomplished, held his empty cap under the traveling gent’s nose. But the gent proved as tight with his pocketbook as with his name. This prompted Lucifer to expand on the special generosity of the colored traveling salesman, who understood the value of a hard-earned dollar, and so forth. When it began to look like the proceedings would not be hastened any other way, the gent dropped some change in the cap; and when the cap never moved, he was forced to cough up some more, each coin increasing the width of Lucifer’s grin. It made you wonder what it would take to extend the grin a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
Summoned from dreams, the pair of ladies rose in unison from the divan, moving in a fluid traipse toward the traveling salesman. Stationed in what I took to be relative safety (between the doorpost and a fishbowl on a pedestal), I watched them remove his straw hat and muss his freshly embrocated hair. The hair remained in upstanding spikes like a woodpecker’s crest. By the time they’d enticed him into the depths of the divan, they had his coat off, his tie undone, his paisley suspenders pulled down over his shoulders. They’d picked his pockets, relieving him of wallet and watch, never mind his unshakable composure of moments before. Rather than made comfortable, he looked, as he slumped between them, succumbing to their dalliance, like a patient being prepared for surgery.
Clearly amused by his client’s broken defenses, Lucifer couldn’t resist adding insult to injury. “When they done with you, m’fine feather frien,” he taunted, “you ain’t remember yo name do you got one.”
It was then that the building began to shake. Maybe I was a little distraught, because my first thought was that the city was on a major fault line. Crevices might be rupturing the surface of the earth, broadening the lagoon till the distance between this place and my father’s shop was unbridgeable. With every tremor the record skipped, the tomcat hiccuped. Then the bamboo parted beside me with a sound like breaking glass and the seismic disturbance stopped, its source having descended the stairs and entered the parlor.
Keeping my head down at first, I saw her feet stuffed into worn mules, the protruding toes wrapped for bunions like bonneted babies. Gathering courage, I saw the thick maple trunks of her legs. She was wearing a flowery housecoat as large as a landscape, hung on hulking shoulders surmounted by a perspiring, monolithic head. Her hair was a nest of curlers over which she was pulling on a tangerine wig.
“Loosfer boy,” she singsonged in a genial, high-pitched voice, “you got some rascal mouf almighty on you. It gon get you strung up one a these day.” With a movement that was all of a piece, nimble despite her bulk, she snatched the flat bottle out of the wise guy’s coat and cuffed his ear. She uncorked it and took a deep pull before consigning it to a pocket of her housecoat. “Everybody gettin quainted in here?” she continued in her cheerful vein. “Now you gals make the genleman feel to home. Sugar Monkey, don’t be mess with his private e-fex, you hear, or I switch ya.” She wiped her glazed forehead with the bladderlike back of her hand. “Do one a y’all kindly loan me yo hosanna fan? It a mite sticky this afternoon.”
So far, happily forgotten, I’d been enjoying a measure of invisibility. But as the fat lady plodded forward, smiling with a menacing sweetness at the beleaguered salesman, I began to feel pretty vulnerable myself. I hugged the wall, managing, as I edged toward a corner, to sidle into the wooden pedestal supporting the fishbowl. The pedestal toppled with a resounding thud, though not before I was able to get under the bowl. Then, with all eyes upon me, it was the barbershop all over again.
The fat lady pivoted her head on neckless shoulders, giving a malevolent squint that nailed me in place. Trying not to cower, I presented the bowl of flat-headed, mustachioed fish like a peace offering. She pointed a pudgy finger and changed her tune. “What this?” she inquired, frowning. Her voice, having dropped several octaves, was practically a baritone now, a voice that you felt like a growling stomach.
I turned hopefully toward Lucifer, who was looking like he couldn’t quite place me either. Was I supposed to come up with another coin? He circled me warily, chewing his lip, yet to decide whether it behooved him to identify me twice in one day. I urged him with a look to be big about this. In the end, please God, he awarded me a conciliatory wink, whispering the word “supper” as he relieved me of the dingy fish. He raised the pedestal and replaced the bowl.
“This here be Mistah Harry from the pawnshops,” he volunteered at length, though his usual hubris seemed a little subdued in the presence of the giantess. “He have come down to try his luck at the policy sweepstake. Meantime I be scortin him round the Negro quarter, kinda edumacate him bout the lay a the land.” His voice swelled as he tugged at my sleeve, which caused me to stumble forward. “Mistah Harry”—always the soul of diplomacy—“I delight for yo honah to meet my gracious Aunt Honey, the very one have fetch I an my brother out the bullrush. She’m the awful grand propriatricks of this fine stablishment, which it is known far and wide as the Baby Doll Hotel.”
I looked up at her avalanche of flesh, the chins rolling in terraces toward her bosom, where the whole prodigious mudslide disappeared into the arbor of her billowing housecoat. My thoughts turned from earthquakes to volcanos.
“Happy to know you,” I stammered, a salutation that came out like a question. “I’m sure,” I added, hoping to resolve the ambiguity. I even went so far as to extend a hand, which, because of my nervous condition, shook i
tself. This earned me a sonorous horse laugh from Aunt Honey. The windowpanes rattled, the floorboards buckled like waves.
“Got nice manners, don’t he,” she nickered, coming closer to drop her heavy hand on my shoulder, further weakening my knees. Then, sharing the wind from her fluttering fan (which might have blown me away but for her leaden grip on my shoulder), she was ominous again, her narrowed eyes nearly lost in the folds of her lacquered face. “Mistah Harry,” she inquired, placing her fan-holding hand on my other shoulder to correct the list, “yo people know where you at?”
Detecting a way out, since out of this fix was where I was definitely ready to get, I wanted to tell her no. I wanted to say that as a matter of fact, given the unaccountable length of my absence, my people were probably speculating on my whereabouts even now. That is, if they hadn’t already panicked, notifying the authorities, who might be tracking me down as we spoke. But the best I could manage was a tongue-tied shake of the head.
Meanwhile one of the ladies had glided over. It was the chartreuse sipper, rampant tsitskehs nosing curiously out of the torn lace of her camisole, who began to run her fingers through my hair. “Bout nappy as a home boy” was her disappointed conclusion, though it didn’t discourage her from continuing to tease. Then another pair of hands, very slender and cloyingly fragrant, began to snake their way around my ribcage from behind. They invaded my shirtfront from which a button popped.
Aunt Honey stepped back to cock her head and fold her ham-size forearms, the flab hanging off them like unfurling sails. “What game it was you say that Mistah Harry come lookin to play?” she insinuated. Lucifer, to whom I silently petitioned for help, favored me with his most patronizing grin so far.
Ticklish as I was ordinarily, I couldn’t laugh. In fact, no sound escaped my throat beyond a miserable whimpered squeak. It was the squeak you sometimes heard out of bubbling mashed potatoes. In seconds I would be reduced to the same degraded circumstance as what was left of the traveling salesman on the divan. The ladies—with their hair of floating seaweed, with their gills and their tailfins shaped like simpering lips—would drag me down, and I would drown here in a fleshpot a couple of blocks and an ocean away from Kaplan’s Loans.
The problem was that I didn’t think I would particularly mind. They could have done whatever they wanted with me, if I hadn’t been so scared. If good old fear hadn’t rattled my bones, even as they were turning to mush, and given me the strength to break free.
“Thank you for your hospitality!” I cried out like bloody murder. As well as I was able on rubber legs, I bolted through the bamboo curtain and made blindly for the nearest crack of light.
I don’t think I’d ever been so happy to see the pawnshop. Having wheeled around the corner from Third Street, I burst in panting on my papa, who was poring over his books. “I’m back!” I declared, like he should slaughter a fatted calf. Not only did he fail to look up at my entrance, to take note of how recent experience had marked my face for life with a terrible knowledge, not only did he ignore his only son, who elsewhere had brought brothels and barbershops to heel, but he never even missed the pastries I hadn’t bought with the money I’d forfeited.
Later that night in my alcove I couldn’t sleep. I wrestled with my pillow, which kept turning into a woman the color of twilight. Then I wrestled with my conscience. After all, there was a point of honor at stake: the matter of forty-five cents change that had yet to be refunded. That Lucifer, he was some kind of sharper all right, and I for one didn’t like being taken in. Of course you could argue that the wise guy had bailed me out of a couple of tight situations, never mind how he might have gotten me into them in the first place. And as for having been careless with Kaplan capital, so what? You had to get up awfully early to be more careless than Kaplan himself, who threw away cash like confetti at a parade.
But if it wasn’t the money, then what was it that prompted me to put on my glasses, to slip out of my pajamas and into my pants at such an advanced hour of the night? Was it really that I thought I had something to prove to some motor-mouthed colored bunco artist? It’s the principle of the thing, I decided, and left it at that, stuffing some dirty clothes under the covers—this in case my father should look in on me, as he sometimes did when he came home from the shop. I pulled on my sneakers and straddled the open window, swinging into the branches of the blossoming mimosa tree.
The spring peepers peeped, the katydids ululated like bicycle bells. The night air, laced with honeysuckle and the high taint of the river, went immediately to my head; I felt, give or take forty-five cents, like a million bucks. I dropped into the alley and picked my way through rank grass, stepping over the corroded pedal cars. Rather than turn toward North Main, which was certainly quiet enough, I preferred to seek out other alleys and back streets. That way, with the stars as my compass, I traveled toward Beale by a kind of underground railroad.
At the corner of Beale and Hernando, there was the usual crush of frantic activity despite the late hour. I walked along briskly, pumping my arms, so that anyone looking would think that the white boy must be on urgent business, let him pass. Intending to head straight for the tonsorial parlor, I glanced to neither the left nor the right. I tried also to disregard their voices, lest some discouraging word tossed my way should spoil my good mood. Still, I couldn’t help catching the odd remark: somebody making supernatural claims for an alto saxophone, somebody threatening to send somebody else home directly—“What you mean home?” “Mean yo home over Jordan, fool!”—somebody saying, “Whoa now, looka here Michael, the man be smoke up the road!”
It took me the better part of a block to put on the brakes and turn around. I hadn’t quite counted on how apprehensive I would be to see him. He was standing next to a fireplug in his undershirt and rug coat, his hands thrust nearly to the elbows in his gaping pockets. It was a posture studiously duplicated by his brother beside him in the ragged straw hat and overalls.
“Mistah Harry,” commented Lucifer when I’d come back within greeting distance, “you must be the most runninest white folks in town.”
I wanted to explain to him how, when last seen, I wasn’t exactly running away. It was just that I’d remembered I had important matters to attend to. There was no end to the responsibilities associated with a pawnshop, he should understand. But instead, still winded from my long dogtrot through the alleys from North Main Street, I leaned casually against the fireplug, like I was accustomed to taking the air at this hour in shvartzer neighborhoods.
There followed an awkward moment when Lucifer, who’d hailed me amiably enough, retreated to a more impersonal “Hidey.”
“Hidey,” I replied with perhaps a little too much bluster, picturing in my agitation a colored girl picking edelweiss on a mountainside. Then I braced myself and came right out with it. “That forty-five cents you still owe me.” At the mention of this Lucifer made a face like he hadn’t the foggiest. Like, even if he knew what I was talking about, it didn’t erase the fact that certain parties were starting to become a nuisance. So be it, I thought: a nuisance is better than the chicken-livered wonder I was determined he shouldn’t see again. “Course, it’s all the same to me,” I went on, “but now that I think of it, that forty-five cents … How much, you know, sightseeing will it get me?”
Lucifer reared back with his hands on his hips to size me up, shaking his head like I just wouldn’t do. He tugged at an earlobe to coax the subtle workings of his brain, then looked toward the silent twin for advice. When none was forthcoming, nothing but the other’s somber vacancy, Lucifer nodded anyway; the point was well taken. Pulling a toothpick out of his cap, he began to pick at a point of light that gleamed from a prominent incisor.
“I have you to know,” he formally announced, “that I an my honable brothah, we bout to commence our shank-a-the-evenin round. Got to visit certain underworld stablishment. Be proud do you woosh to company the bofe of us two.”
It was a dare only thinly disguised as an invitation. But
before I could puff myself up enough to answer, the wise guy had already started to walk away. “Jus say uncle when you done had enough,” he added over the shoulders of himself and his brother, who shambled in lockstep at his heels.
I told myself that this was what I’d come for, wasn’t it?—though I wished he’d given me time to study the pros and cons. But never mind. I intended to show him what I was made of, how I had graduated in a single afternoon from a fraidycat to a full-fledged I-don’t-know-what. The word “goat” came to mind.
The way the kid behaved, you’d have thought that he owned the street, which I was perfectly content to believe. Dogging Lucifer’s coattails, slightly to the rear of his brother’s single-strapped overalls, I was happy to be a shadow once removed. Hadn’t I been sore thumb enough for one day? I kept close behind them with my profile low, imitating a little (as did his brother Michael) Lucifer’s loose-limbed walk—the way his hands scooped the air as in a swimmer’s stroke. Once I paused only long enough to do a double take at the spectacle of a one man band. Then I learned, as I hurried to catch up with them, just how much I didn’t want to be left behind.
When I asked what exactly was the nature of these evening rounds, Lucifer turned to say only, “Round mean lak in a circle.” But pretty soon it became apparent that what they were doing was running errands. They were couriers, delivering messages to men in Stetsons with snakeskin hatbands. Men with hair like crows’ wings and parts like zippered seams, with gold-inlaid stars in their teeth. These were none too friendly characters whom Lucifer didn’t seem to mind distracting from intense pursuits. They might be, for instance, involved in drawing a bead down the shaft of a custom pool cue; they might be blowing on a pair of dice or shuffling cards with such dexterity that it looked like they were playing accordion—when Lucifer chose to butt in.