Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  A few of the men threw their hats but most of them fell silent, a silence more complete for the tumult of moments before. It put me in mind of that part of the moonlight baptism where a person is dunked under water and everyone else holds their breath.

  “Oolala!” squealed the naked lady, her accent most decidedly un-French. “The kid never known it was such good eatin’ at the Y.”

  This was when I got the nod from Lucifer. He had spotted a straw-skimmered sideshow sharper who, having apparently spotted us first, was advancing from around the corner of the stage. We dropped to the ground running but were forced to turn back for Michael, who’d remained glued to the scene. By the time we’d dislodged his grip on the stage, the carnival man was upon us, backing us into the canvas, which we needed no invitation to scram underneath.

  Out in the compound, however, it was my turn to pause and look back toward the tent. Shoving his brother ahead, Lucifer stopped long enough to tug my sleeve and give a word to the wise. “Bes absquatulate, Mistah Harry, else they circle-size you all over again.”

  This helped me to remember that I’d been seen in the company of Negroes tom-peeping on a buck-naked white lady. If for such crimes the shvartzers had their eyes gouged out and made into buttons to sew shut their mouths, then what of me? What of the youth of Hebrew extraction who’d helped them to see what they should never have seen?

  Then I was hightailing it through the lot behind the twins, keeping pace with my pounding heart, its din driving the stray thoughts from between my ears. Lucifer found the loose hoarding and the three of us scrambled through as one frantic multilimbed klutz. Fleeing the park, we stuck to the dry side of Front Street, putting half a dozen blocks between ourselves and the amusements before we dared to draw up in an alley to catch our breath.

  Mine, though, stayed elusive. We were safe enough here in this cul-de-sac behind the classing houses, so what was the trouble? The question seemed also to be on the wise guy’s mind as he passed me his medicine bottle. He was giving me the once-over, with special attention to the area below my waist, which I attempted to cover too late with my shirttail. Then he puckered his face to make the diagnosis, this doctor from Chelm. “Mistah Harry,” said Lucifer, “we has to fine you some poon fo yo britches split an ol Hambone done join the party.”

  He made it sound like my inexperience was everybody’s burden to bear. It was enough to make you want to take issue with all of his own windbag claims—the boasts that, if intended to make me eat my heart out, had been pretty successful. All that stuff about how he’d been initiated by this one or that one at some impossibly precocious age. How he’d done it under dogtrots or in the branches of persimmons, in the dressing room at Schwab’s Emporium while the clerk outside the curtain asked how was the fit. He’d done it in the deep leather back seat of Colonel George Lee’s double-parked DeSoto in the time it took the colonel to run into the Pantaze Drugstore for cigars. He’d done it, to hear him kiss and tell it, with all kinds—from the ones who’d been around the block to the daughter of the pastor of the Jesus Wept Tabernacle. He’d done it with the big ones, which felt like you were squeezing a cloud, and the skinny ones who clung like marsupials when you tried to leave; the ones who bit plugs out of you and the ones who spoke languages they swore they’d never heard; the seasoned ladies who gave you instructions that, if followed to the letter, caused their skin to ripple like it was made of rolling pins; the young things who hollered like they’d been gutted of their slippery souls.

  To all these conquests the wise guy laid claim to, I would have liked to pronounce a hearty Bronx cheer. Not that it would have mattered to Lucifer, always his own most gullible audience. For him, the mere saying was believing.

  “Why pick on me?” I demanded in any case, about to point out that his brother was having the same difficulty with his breathing as I was.

  But Lucifer was busy again. He was examining an imaginary wristwatch, checking its precision against a fading smudge of sunset over the river. “I makes it bout a hair past my chegro bite,” he said. “Time fo the barge be comin in.”

  Because of the unretreating floodwaters, there’d been some controversy over whether it was safe to sail the royal barge this year. The problem, as the papers saw it, was not actually sailing so much as docking the barge while the levee was still submerged. But as in the case of the Carnival itself, tradition won out over cautious opinion and a temporary landing stage was constructed at the foot of Beale.

  When we arrived at the scene, the crowd was already at high tide; a solid mass of spectators was backed up almost to Main Street. There were people riding one another’s shoulders, in some cases double piggyback. They were standing on rooftops, hanging out of windows and fire escapes, clinging to the bannered lampposts. The sight of such a mighty crush of spectators dampened what hopes I’d had of getting an unobstructed view of the river. But Lucifer, as usual, didn’t know enough to be discouraged.

  Darting eel-like, tapping on shoulders and pinching when necessary, he sidled through the multitude so neatly that you’d have thought he was following a predetermined route. Behind him his brother fitted himself snugly into the spaces that Lucifer left in his wake, leaving me to suffer the scorn of the onlookers as they tried to close ranks again. In this way we negotiated an acre of perspiring humanity, coming to a full stop only when we’d reached the rope that divided the crowd from the floating dock.

  I guess you could say that this was my official debut in white society among colored boys. None of the smattering of Negroes I’d seen on the fringes of the crowd seemed to have penetrated it to this depth. So if this wasn’t tempting fate, I didn’t know what was. But as Lucifer had made it quite clear that I wasn’t in charge anymore, I was happy to let him worry about things—that is, if he even knew how to worry. Of course, given the boisterous density of the spectators, nobody seemed especially concerned about the company I’d come in. Besides, it was dark out now, and the swordplay of spotlights along the levee was trained on the river and the sky.

  From where we stood on the cobbles, just below the trestle and not ten feet from the water, we could already see the barge passing beneath the Harahan Bridge. From this distance it looked like a multilayered seagoing wedding cake, riding the platter of its own reflection. It was a storybook vessel, or so it appeared, making a preliminary stop before it continued upstream toward its real destination, which was probably the moon. Immediately I understood why Lucifer had suspended his disapproval of the Carnival for this single event.

  There was a band on board, which you could now make out in their toy soldier outfits, posed up and down a staircase of footlighted cotton bales. They were playing what sounded at first like a variation on the general drone of the crowd, this until the barge came closer. Then melodies began to detach themselves from the surrounding murmurousness. They played “Waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee” and “Mr. Crump Don’t ‘Low,” a local favorite that listed the activities that the political boss had proscribed for the welfare of all. As the barge drew near the landing, the band went into a spirited rendition of “Dixie,” and there was scarcely a dry eye in the crowd. In fact, some of the yokels—hatchet-faced river refugees by the look of them—placed their hands over their hearts.

  Meanwhile the sky above Arkansas had begun to crackle and thunder with salvos of fireworks, causing some to cover their heads. Explosions rained over us: fantastic blossoms that grew in an instant to the size of the firmament, then dripped bright nectar as they swiftly faded away. There were nets of silver and green incandescence, spilling cargoes of luminous fruit, jeweled spiders spinning gas-blue filaments by which they dropped from the upstaged stars. People pointed as if they were about to attach a name to the lastest array, but “ooh” and “ahh” were all that anyone, including Lucifer, could think to say.

  Under cover of all this, a couple of Carnival pages began to unfurl a tongue of red carpet, rolling it across the gangplank and up the cobbles toward a suite of waiting limousines. There w
as a flourish of lights and pompous music and a voice over the public address bidding unctuous welcome. Then, from their thrones atop the highest tier of the pyramid of cotton bales, the sovereigns of the Carnival rose. Followed by the slow train of their glittering retinue, they began their triumphal disembarkation from the barge.

  Surging forward for a better view, the crowd shoved us up against the braided rope. Thus were we within spitting distance of the passing royalty. For all of his finery—the crimson cape trimmed in spotted ermine, the gold frogs and epaulets on a snow-white tunic, the medallion like a gilded pie crust—I thought the king looked a little uncomfortable under his heavy crown. With gravy eyes, the clef sign of an oily forelock setting off his dissipated features, he looked like the victim of a practical joke. Like he’d passed out after too many toddies, only to wake up on a showboat in monarchical robes. Still, he seemed committed to making the best of it, swatting the air with a scepter that he wielded like a tennis racket. This was in contrast to his pretty consort, who waved her own scepter as blithely as a magic wand.

  She was a doozy all right. You name it, she had it: the vapory coif arranged in a heart-shaped setting around her serenely smiling face; the buttermilk skin highlighted by the port-wine nevus on her shoulder, like a fleur-de-lis. She had the plump boozalums crushing a corsage that had tried to come between them, plunging dolphinlike into the deep bodice of her emerald gown. All of which I appreciated, even if she wasn’t my type.

  Her rose-petal lips were too simpering for my taste, her eyes, which the lights showed a transparent china blue, too dreamy and far apart. They lacked the candid come-hither quality that I liked in the ladies of the Baby Doll; give me their saucy temptations any day. This one was for yawning behind her dance card, or waving her hankie at a departing troop train. At best she might tear a strip from her petticoat to bind your mortal wound as you expired with her name on your lips. But she was altogether too much the universal shiksa for me.

  Still, you had to hand it to her. She carried herself with a pleasingly self-possessed grace, what you might almost call majesty. To say nothing of how her sparkling diadem looked like a tiny castle in the cloud of her corn-silk hair.

  But if I wasn’t impressed enough, others certainly were. All around us the spectators kept up a jubilant ovation, some of them (albeit the more primitive and confused) actually falling to their knees. Here and there some frail onlooker, overcome by an excess of pageantry, might crumple into a swoon; they might be revived by furious fanning and spirits of ammonia, only to crumple again. Who would have thought that his shikkered highness and a milk-fed tootsie could have created such a holy stir? Even Michael, as I noticed, wasn’t above being moved by it all. With a spasmodic though somehow prayerful rhythm, completely out of sync with the processional march of the band, he’d begun to sway from side to side. At one point he uncovered the burnished knob of his head and began to gnaw at his hat brim, taking a healthy bite out of the straw and chewing earnestly. On top of all this, if my ears didn’t deceive me, he seemed to have started to moan.

  It was an irritating sound whose source I couldn’t locate at first, until it began to rise above the general commotion. Even then it took a minute to convince me that this unjoyful noise did in fact belong to the dummy. It was the first peep that, to my knowledge, had ever come out of him, a thick, gurgling whine from somewhere deep in his diaphragm, like a noise bubbling up out of an antediluvian well. By the time it had my complete attention, as well as Lucifer’s (with whom I exchanged a puzzled look), by the time it had the attention of every bystander within earshot, the noise had graduated to a sharp but still throaty keen. It was a wrenching ejaculation, which had contorted the dummy’s face into the shape of a horn.

  Then suddenly Michael’s newfound voice had lost its rust. It was a voice that had swapped its gills for wings, bursting forth in an exultation of virgin words.

  “Lawd ha mercy!” he cried, sailing what was left of his hat into the pyrotechnical sky. “I wusht I be blind! I wusht I be struck blind direckly! She’m the las thing I see, everything else be disrumumbumf…”

  The rest was muffled in the hand that Lucifer had clapped over his brother’s mouth. Like a thief caught in the act by an alarm, the wise guy frantically whipped his head from left to right. He looked as if he wanted anything, a sack or a handy hole, to stuff the dummy into, a blunt instrument to clunk over his skull. He crooked an arm around Michael’s straining neck for the purpose of strangling him, or so it looked, though I suppose the hold could have passed for a lifesaver’s embrace.

  At no time during our acquaintance had I ever seen the cocky kid so farshvitzed with panic, and the truth was that I could have done without seeing it now. As Lucifer manhandled the bug-eyed ex-mute through the crowd, dragging him toward higher ground,. I was satisfied to trot along faithfully after. I was content to keep a discreet distance behind them, wondering if miracles would never cease.

  III

  Ten

  Once he’d been wrestled away from the levee, and the royal entourage was finally out of view, Michael ceased to put up a fight. All his energy, it seemed, had been enlisted in the making of language, and toward that end he continued to struggle while his brother continued to shut him up.

  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 li
ke 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 richeer,’ 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…”