Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground

by Steve Stern

  “Now am the time we done quit pussy-putz around.”

  With his arm locked in mine, he steered me down to the kitchen, assuring me that it had come to him what steps must be taken, and along with this revelation had come a plan that was virtually foolproof. Shoving aside some skillets and a coffeepot, he sat me atop an uncomfortably warm coal-burning stove. I slid down, protesting, “What am I, dinner?” only to be hoisted back up again. From his pocket Lucifer produced a compact can of black boot polish, waving it in front of my nose like I was supposed to know what it was for.

  All this was making me very nervous. Nor did it help that his grin chose this moment to make its spectacular comeback. Beaming, Lucifer related a scheme so preposterous that I was at a loss for words.

  Not that I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. “I’ve got a hunch it just might be crazy enough to work!” or some such shtus was what your faithful sidekick would have exclaimed. But given that Lucifer had just removed my glasses and begun to daub my forehead and cheeks with the polish, smearing dollops of it in thick waxy circles with his fingers, the best I could offer was “Wait just a cotton-picking minute!” Ignoring my complaints and brushing away the hands I held up to fend him off, he warned me not to move, then brought out his chammy cloth and gave it a snap. He proceeded to buff my face like a shoe. After a few strokes he registered a nod and clucked, “Mistah Harry, I is proud a the way you done took a shine.”

  Black as a old crow belly is how he assessed me, guiding my fingers into a pair of black gardening gloves. Then he stepped back and told me to look sharp. “Hop down, else you sweat an spile my handy work.”

  “Listen,” I said, to buy time, “my grandpa’s got these old books he used to read me to sleep from. They got all kinds of recipes how to get rid of evil spirits and such.” I was thinking specifically of the stuff about the demon Lilith, Adam’s first wife. In the books there were prescriptions, fairly simple incantations with a minimum of burnt offerings, that kept you safe from her interference in the night. They protected you from wetting the bed, an emission that Lilith was held directly responsible for—and, who knew, they might also retard incontinence of the mouth.

  “So what do you say? It might just be crazy enough…”

  Lucifer only snorted and replaced my spectacles like he was pinning a tail on a donkey. “Them book,” he said contemptuously, and snorted again. “Now looka here. What you think have got the boy in this suckumstance cep them book.”

  “Where’ve you been? You never heard of fighting fire with fire?” I asked him, conviction fizzling from my voice as I spoke. It was useless to try and turn him around when he had such a head of steam. Up to some risky business, he was back in his element again, but this time I told him in no uncertain terms that he could count me out.

  Who would have thought that the wise guy could be so sensitive? His features caved in, and all of a sudden he was pitiful. “Mistah Harry,” he confessed, “I dasn’t do no sich a thing less you come along.”

  That’s how I happened to be trotting beside Lucifer through a twilit concatenation of alleys on our way to the Peabody Hotel. Or the Hotel Peabody, as it was called, on account of its distinction and class, its history of visiting potentates and notorious gangsters. On Beale Street it was often referred to as the Big House, since almost everyone had worked there in some capacity, including Lucifer, who’d served the odd stint as a bellhop. There’d been this notice in the Commercial Appeal: it seemed that one of your grand Pooh-Bah secret societies (somebody tell me what’s secret about a society that announces its doings in the papers) was hosting a banquet for the Carnival royalty on the hotel’s Plantation Roof.

  Lucifer had made up his mind that we would attend the banquet and seek an audience with the Carnival queen. There ought not to be any problem getting in, since during the Carnival season there was always such a rabble of extra help. “You got yo house nigger run every whoochaway, look like a rumpus race, alius in a fine confunkshun. Who goin to know we ain’t on the ficial payroll?” Once we’d successfully infiltrated the affair, the wise guy would take the first opportunity to approach her highness and plead his brother’s case. An understanding and benevolent monarch, she would tap his head and shoulders with her scepter, saying, “Rise up, Sir Lucifer.” She would graciously accompany him back to the Baby Doll, gliding through a gauntlet of curtsies into the sickroom. At the sight of her hovering there at his bedside, summoned into flesh from the words of his love-crazed shpiel, Michael would be jolted out of his fever. He would at last be restored to good health and his ordinary dumbfoundedness.

  I had given up trying to point out the many ways that this scheme was full of holes. That it lacked the twin’s typical shrewdness went without saying, never mind that it wasn’t quite logical. Also, I didn’t like the sound of this secret society business, which made me think of blood-stained altars, people wielding curved knives like moels. But what troubled me most was what the plan said about Lucifer’s state of mind. Ever since Michael had been struck undumb, the wise guy had been, in his own way, as out of control as his love-bludgeoned brother. When he wasn’t too wretched to move from his corner, he was walking around half cocked, in need of someone with sense to look out for his welfare. And who else was there but Harry Kaplan to fill that bill?

  Through a revolving door we entered the lobby, which no other place in the city could touch for its swank. The place seemed to give the lie to the rumor of hard times. If, as was popularly touted, the lobby of the Peabody was where the Delta began, it was also where the Depression ended.

  Its rich jade carpets were ankle-deep and echo-absorbent, its chandeliers like meteors. A pink marble fountain tossed a silver plume of water over a gaggle of paddling ducks, and a grand piano played itself. The cigarette vendor had legs like a thoroughbred, her face a dead ringer for Carole Lombard; bellhops on roller skates paged guests with expensive names. The sofas and satin loveseats, shaped like soft orange squeezers, were lousy with cotton barons in spotless white suits. There were film stars in the company of mobsters, courtesans like jaguars escorted by financiers conspiring over pastel drinks with paper parasols. There were espionage agents on the mezzanine, peering from behind false goatees, or at least that’s what I took them for. And they all reminded me just how far we’d strayed from Beale Street.

  No doubt sensing my reluctance, Lucifer kept a tight grip on my arm, leading me where we had no earthly business going. Shifted into his furtive mode, he hurried me past a bell captain leaning across the checkin desk. He jerked me while I looked over my shoulder for house detectives behind a humid wall of caladiums and banana plants. We bungled up some stairs where the opulent lobby abruptly gave way to an unadorned passage, its ceiling low with exposed steam pipes. At the far end of the passage was an open service elevator, toward whose scuffed recesses Lucifer had begun to shove me. He had to shove because I was starting to dig in my heels.

  Under different circumstances I might have appreciated how well the kid knew his way around. But tonight I feared the worst. It was becoming increasingly clear to me that this enterprise was beyond foolhardy: it was suicidal. The greasy minstrel makeup that was clogging my pores wasn’t going to fool anybody, and I didn’t mind telling the twin.

  “Say what, Brothah Sambo?” chirped Lucifer, tugging a cord inside the elevator, which in turn closed a gate from above and below like jaws. For a moment he looked at me as if he actually expected an answer, then broke into a fit of chortling laughter, slapping his thigh.

  “Go ahead and knock yourself out,” I told him stiffly. “I’ll worry enough for the both of us.”

  He yanked a lever, and my knees buckled suddenly from the risen floor. As the column of numbers on the wall winked on and off in their ascent, I gritted my teeth. I held my nose to pop my ears, thinking I wouldn’t put it past him to launch this contraption crashing through the roof. Then a bell sounded, a P at the top of the column winked red, and my stomach rose from my shoes to my throat.

&
nbsp; When the gate yawned open, we were presented with a scene that made me wonder: had we been hurtling somehow in the wrong direction? Cauldrons steamed and braziers flared. Black men with broad, lustrous faces and aprons stained in gore, with tall hats like ossified smoke, labored with dripping brushes over turning racks of meat. They presided over boiling pots and flaming grills, stirring and basting with a grim-visaged intent. Stoically they endured the antics of waiters who looked like they’d lately been tumbled from a barrel of monkeys. A swarm in white jackets, they balanced their trays with a breathtaking precariousness on the fingers of a single hand, or with no hands at all on the tops of their heads. Dodging one another in a deftly executed series of near pratfalls, they came that close to taking what appeared to be choreographed spills.

  I wasn’t in any hurry to leave the elevator, but Lucifer had me by the wrist again, hauling me out into the thick of that infernal activity. Waiters swerved and skidded all around us, avoiding us so narrowly that I had to cover my eyes. When I peeked through my fingers, I discovered that the traffic had begun to give us a wider berth in deference to the stately eminence, his chest decorated in a bonanza of gold buttons and braids, who’d planted himself in our path.

  By his finery I recognized him as none other than the honorary mayor of Beale Street himself, and was a little relieved. But his unbending military demeanor kept me at attention. Arms folded, he was demanding in a mellow baritone, “What you burr-heads think you doin out a uniform?”

  Instantly I was plunged into unreasonable guilt, while Lucifer was quick to offer, “Weeuns have a illness in the fambly.” He doffed his cap to dab briefly at a crocodile tear, then bravely assured the mayor, whom he called Cap’m, that we were ready to work. I couldn’t believe we were getting away scot-free.

  Next to the time clock and a roster-covered bulletin board was a row of pegs from which heavily starched white jackets were hanging. Selecting one for himself with discrimination, Lucifer helped me on with another, chosen at random. He turned down the collar and rolled up the sleeves until my hands finally appeared. Then he slapped my back and grinned. “It fit you to a T,” he said, though it engulfed me like a bellying sail.

  I wanted to try on another jacket, but Lucifer already had me headed toward a single file of waiters. They were lined up along a gangway of slippery wooden planks snaking between the steam tables and rôtisseries. Older than we were and generally taller, some with high pockets at the level of our eyes, they took no notice of our bringing up the rear. They were anyway too engaged in the exercise of various heel-and-toe posturings. One shook his hips while spinning an empty tray as broad as a table top; another boogie-woogied in place. Still another, dipping pasamala-style, snatched dishes from the counter behind him with cardsharp flicks of the wrist. Meanwhile the chefs were doling portions, slinging food with their spatulas and tongs as if they were meting out punishment.

  Taking a tray from a stainless steel bin, which promptly delivered up another, Lucifer turned to advise me, “Jus do like I do.” Then he proceeded to gyrate his hips, removing his cap to rest his tray on top of his head, thus leaving his fingers free to drum the air. The deeper into hot water we got, the more brazenly Lucifer acted, and the more worried I became. I tried to tell myself that all his jerking and posing was nothing he could help; it was a nervous symptom of his race. Then I began to think I too could hear ethereal music above the uproar of the kitchen: big band music with lots of brass. In fact, I believed I could even name the tune, “Three Little Fishies,” its refrain so catchy—“Oop boop dit-em dat-em what-em chu!”—that I was tempted to follow Lucifer’s example. I was almost disappointed to realize that every time the portholed doors swung open, admitting waiters on their way in or out, the music swelled.

  By now Lucifer had begun to march forward with his already laden tray held high. Barely missing a collision with another waiter, he made a pirouette, then backed through the double doors, which flapped behind him. Afraid to let him out of my sight, I tried my best to hurry. I hastily transferred a dozen or so plates from the counter to a tray of my own, which I then endeavored to lift. It was a lot like attempting single-handedly to raise a roof. Tottering bowlegged under it, I aimed myself in the direction of a fresh blast of music. I waited for the doors to swing open and made a blind lunge, praying I would encounter no obstacles while passing through.

  I was standing, or rather stooping, on a wide parqueted terrace with no other ceiling above me but my upraised serving tray. First I saw the band, more than fifty pieces strong by the look of it: the Swing Beans, as they were designated on their music stands in scrolled letters beneath logos of dancing pods. They were seated behind a low-railed dance floor, on the columned veranda of a full-scale Plantation House façade. Electric candles shone in the balconied windows; colored lights studded the boughs of two-dimensional live oaks and the eyes of painted peacock tails.

  The band leader, whose pea-green swallowtails waved the complement to his baton, turned around to reveal a face that was two-thirds smile. He begged permission to change the tempo to something more in keeping with the hour, a little number called “Red Sails in the Sunset,” in salute to the evening sky. This seemed appropriate, since the sky, as observed from such a height above the city, looked indistinguishable from the scarlet floodplain below, as if the state of Arkansas were emptying itself into the heavens, or vice versa.

  I lowered my tray to the crown of my head, crushing my chin against my collarbone. Uncomfortable as this was, it gave me a chance to take in the rest of the hotel roof. Under paper lanterns orbited by moths, the guests were seated about a U-shaped arrangement of banquet tables facing the fake plantation and the dance floor. Wearing silk sashes over tuxedos and night-blooming corsages on ball gowns, festive in cardboard fezzes, laurel wreaths, and pirate hats, they were raising their glasses, toasting the middle table, from which hung a banner bordered in hieroglyphics, embossed with this glittering proclamation:

  The Bluff City Chapter

  of

  The Mighty Sphinx Order

  of

  MYSTIC MEMPHI

  Honors

  The Court of King Lamar IV

  and

  Queen Marva June

  As secret societies went, this one didn’t look so diabolical, but I still felt that, of all the strange places Lucifer had taken me to, this was the most alien. Couples might be gearing up for a lindy hop on the polished dance floor, while the band went into the ever popular “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.” Ladies might be worrying their escort’s bow tie, or wetting fingers to batten down a wayward cowlick. But I wasn’t fooled. This was a perilous place, and we would never get away with it. We would never pass for the servants of the food of the gods—which was, incidentally, pork ribs, baked beans, coleslaw, and corn on the cob, with a choice of fruit cup or pie à la mode for dessert.

  I spotted Lucifer making straight for the table where the crowned heads were seated. There was the stinko King Lamar IV and, beside him, the silky blond queen. She was smiling with incurious eyes, her tiara close to capsizing in the permanent wave of her hair. Having picked up a slab of ribs, she held it as delicately as a panpipe, then proceeded to tear flesh from bone with flashing teeth and a winsome toss of the head. Okay, I thought, so she’s your grade-A shayne maidel. Even smeared with sauce like a daub of warpaint, her skin has the sheen of what? freshly minted shekels? And her coloring bespeaks generations of having kept mongrel impurities clear of the blood. She was a doll, I wouldn’t dispute it, but prettiness aside, was this a face to make the dumb speak? What did this ambrosia-stuffed Queen Marva June have to do with the lady whose praises were being sung in that squalid closet off Beale?

  Oh, she could flirt all right, patting her lips with a napkin to hide a yawn. She could blow a kiss with deadly accuracy, perfectly at her ease at this celestial altitude. But it still took a knocked-out shvartzer back on terra firma to make her divine.

  A poke in the kidneys from the head waiter/mayor roused me. O
nce again I was forced to assume a variety of unnatural postures to keep from spilling the contents of my tray. By the time I recovered myself, the mayor had moved on, though not before warning me to get the lead out of my tail.

  I approached the tables with the intention of filling empty place settings with plates. This was easier said than done, especially given the amount of wobbling I was prone to. Nor did it make things more manageable when I tried to brace the tray against my hip, since my arm wasn’t long enough to hold it—though even if it had been, I still would have been short by at least another arm to perform effectively. I was further un-steadied by constantly having to swivel my head back and forth to keep track of Lucifer. Calamity came quickly enough, when I upset a glass of wine into the lap of one of the guests I was trying to serve.

  “Watch it, boy!” snapped this horse-faced character, hair combed into a pompadour like the neck of a violin. I don’t know why this should have especially hurt my feelings. He hadn’t used strong language, only called me boy, which after all was what I was. But something in his tone of voice made me feel misused, bent under my serving tray like an ancestor under a pyramid stone.

  Wanting somehow to erase the whole incident, I set down my tray and began to tug at the edge of the tablecloth. I meant to use it as a towel, to assist the guest in wiping the spill from his trousers. But my efforts succeeded only in dragging his dinner to the brink of the table, where it teetered just shy of following the lead of his drink. In the end all I got for my trouble was roughly shoved aside.

  The band struck up a polka with a beat like a leaky faucet. Close to tears now, I was nearly at the point of letting them go, but for the prospect of spoiling my makeup. Without thinking, I stooped to lift my miserable tray again, then wondered what I was doing. Why should I stand here struggling with this ungainly burden when Lucifer had already rid himself of his?