As Papa and I rode down Front Street in the plush-upholstered cab of Mr. Gruber’s smooth-running hearse, I saw for the first time just how far the river had risen. The old paint-chipped, cast-iron classing houses that lined the eastern side of the street were hidden behind tall stacks of cotton. This was cotton salvaged from the deluged warehouses at the bottom of the bluff below. Precariously balanced, the bales formed a bulwark of chalk-white palisades, which overlooked the pools of prune-purple water down the slope where the levee had been. To the west the drifting plain of what they call the Big Muddy had no visible bank at all. In fact, there was no horizon to let you know when you were sailing out of the navigable (if hazardous) gunmetal currents into the unmapped gun-metal skies. Only a stranded stubble of unsubmerged trees marked the spot—rest in peace—that once was Arkansas.
The foot of Beale Street was also under the river, which lapped now about the pilings of the Illinois Central Railroad overpass. On top of the elevated trestle a gang of scruffy truants were dangling their skinny legs, pointing at a floating silo that rolled like a lolling leviathan under a flock of barnyard fowl.
I recognized a couple of them from my school, snot-nosed shaygets hooligans who mocked me for a Yankee or a Yid or a four-eyed bookworm if they spoke to me at all. Among their ranks was also a wild Jewboy or two, from whom I’d received much the same treatment, not that I had any use for the lot of them. Friends had always been a commodity that I could mostly do without, thank you very much. They were forever goading you to join them in their pointless games and explorations when you had much better things to do. So maybe it was just that I happened to be wearing a suit on a morning when bare feet would have been more in the mode, that I somehow resented my exclusion from their tomfoolery. Then I had to remind myself that while they were wasting their time, I was involved in an important, even sacred, commission.
As we rounded the corner into Beale, my papa, who’d been thoughtfully silent ever since we’d left the Pinch, looked back to observe, “It’s like the view from Mount Ararat after the ark runs aground.” This was untypical of his off-the-wall remarks, which didn’t ordinarily include references to the Bible.
We were headed up the hill toward Main Street in time to meet a convoy of gear-grinding trucks coming down. To the rattling wooden tailgates and running boards of these trucks, their beds piled high with bags of sand, dozens of colored men were clinging for dear life. Some of them were wearing the county-issued striped pajamas, while others were dressed nattily in seersuckers, level straw skimmers, and spats. Armed police in dark glasses and mud-spattered spit shines, poised like they were squiring dignitaries, drove their motorcycles on either flank. Bewildered, I turned to ask Papa what he thought was going on, but got only this curt reply: “Mr. Crump decided to build a pyramid—how should I know?”
He seemed frankly a little on edge, my papa, constantly looking over his shoulder as if to make sure that we’d made a clean getaway. Like he wanted to reconfirm that the funeral cavalcade had not followed us from North Main Street, calling more attention to our enterprise than it needed. Of course I was also relieved on that score, glad that we were on our own again and that Mama and Uncle Morris had volunteered to stay and look after Grandpa Isador. Moreover, I was pleased to have been elected, even though I hadn’t asked, to ride shotgun (so to speak) on my grandmother’s next-to-last journey. Honestly, I didn’t know what had gotten into me lately—that instead of sitting alone with a book, I should be hanging out the window of a murmuring hearse, determined not to miss a single detail of this unusual day.
We crossed over Main Street and started down the long hill into the pawnshop district. That’s when we were presented with the sight that caused even the unflappable Mr. Gruber, suddenly sucking in air, to miss a gear. From Main down to Third, the street was still business as usual: the pullers lollygagged among the show racks while the eye-buyers swarmed the sidewalks, golden balls dangling over their heads like King Midas’s apples—the whole place with a sharp, freshly minted clarity in the aftermath of the rains. But just below Third Street everything was changed. Stranding the row of garish old buildings on the right-hand side of the street and pouring over into what you could call the sunken gardens of Handy Park on the other was a sizable body of water. Its coppery surface, ruffled by the wind, was even further disturbed by a crazy flotilla of wooden fishing dinghies and skiffs. Gliding and colliding back and forth across the water in helter-skelter navigation, they looked like aquatic bumper cars.
What floored me the most, however, was not the mere fact that Beale Street had been so outlandishly transformed—this you could sort of explain. What knocked me for a loop was how natural everything looked. The startling existence of the water seemed to have erased the memory of the original thoroughfare. One glimpse and I could hardly think back to a time when that crowded lagoon hadn’t been a regular feature of the local landscape.
As I was leaning a bit too far out the window, Papa reeled me back into the front seat by my coattails. “Our catastrophes,” he sighed, “they’re the shvartzers’ holidays.” This was maybe his effort to restore a sobriety more in keeping with our solemn errand, though I could have sworn I saw the good humor beginning to tug at the muscles around his mouth. And his eyes blinked the suggestion that, on such a strange day, who could help behaving like shvartzers?
Mr. Gruber pulled his hearse to a puttering stop alongside the granite curb in front of Kaplan’s Loans, and there sat Oboy with his back to the iron lattice. In place of his stool, which must still have been locked up inside the shop, he was perched on an upended Kickapoo crate. It was a pointless fidelity, of course, since Kaplan’s had been kept closed for the funeral—though I didn’t suppose that Oboy had been informed. And besides, when does a wooden Indian leave the cigar store? He was sitting, as usual, with his canvas cap pulled low on his leathery forehead. Gazing in the direction of the outsize puddle down the street, he looked like someone scouring the horizon for dry land.
He remained in that frozen posture until after we’d stepped out on the sidewalk, when all at once he came to life. He sprang from his crate and, without being prompted, beat my father to the rear of the hearse. Opening the door, he started to tug at the casket as if he’d done this sort of thing before, as if he’d read in my papa’s lingering apprehensiveness (he was looking both ways up and down the avenue) a signal to make haste and unload this shipment of possibly dubious goods. After all, in a book, wouldn’t this be the part where somebody pulls a switcheroo and the body turns out to be replaced by contraband? But just as Papa was cautioning Oboy to be gentle, the box slipped out of the puller’s grip.
It fell to the curb, jarring loose the hingeless lid, which slid open, exposing my grandma to any interested party along the street. Thanks to Mr. Gruber’s handiwork, the old lady, who’d never looked too awfully alive, now appeared to be entirely artificial, like a furiously puckered toy papoose. Only the single glaucous eye, which the mortician, for all his craft, had been unable to batten down, identified her as the real thing.
I tried to tell myself that she looked very nice considering, but I was skewered by her open eye. As militantly disapproving in death as it had been in life, it seemed to demand to know why all of this was being done to her. Why could she not have been left to carry on sitting in her unscented stiffness by the apartment window, where she had never really been in anyone’s way? This was the point where I had to renew my efforts to believe that, for a change, my father knew what he was doing.
“That’s my mamele in there,” explained Papa, completing his admonition to Oboy despite the fait accompli. The puller grunted like he was pleased to meet her, though his place was seemingly not to question why; scruples, so far as I could tell, were not a part of his makeup. Then, closing the lid quickly lest she create a public nuisance, Oboy resumed tugging at the casket. This was how he always moved on those occasions when he was disposed to move: like he was in a hurry. As if he were one of those golems out of my grandfather’s antiquated books who must take swift advantage of their quickened bones before they were turned back into inanimate clay.
Mr. Gruber came padding forward to lend his tacit assistance. He was joined by a couple of loiterers with jaws like blue charcoal, with vests displaying old war medals and torn hobnail shoes showing the toes of union suits. I’d seen this before, how these down-on-their-luck characters would appear as if from the steam vents at the least chance of earning a handout. I was left, as usual, with nothing to do.
After unlocking the lattice, my father turned around and began, somewhat uncertainly, to orchestrate the entrance of Grandma Zippe into Kaplan’s Loans. As you could tell by the way he was beckoning the pallbearers, with his left hand contradicting his right, the role of director did not come to him naturally. But once he’d backed through the shop door, sweeping aside the show racks that had yet to be hauled outside, my papa was another man. He was competent, even cheerful, a regular impresario leaving no question as to who was in charge. Behind him the pallbearers—who had veered drunkenly at first, grumbling under their burden as they stooped to compensate for Oboy’s dwarfish size—followed faithfully where he led. Gingerly Papa steered them down the aisle between the narrow straits of the display cases. Having thus conducted their safe passage, he left them a moment to fend for themselves. He unlatched the little gate that led through his tiny office to the storage area, then strode on ahead to the chicken-wire cage where he kept his so-called valuables.
This was my papa’s holy of holies, the cache in which the really vintage rubbish had been culled from the garden-variety—a fine distinction that required a more discerning eye than my own. A little too fastidiously, under the circumstances, Papa cleared a space among the lady-shaped mood lamps and the fractured Victrolas, the model locomotives and the dumbbells endorsed by Eugene Sandow, the alleged papyrus scrolls. He posed a dressmaker’s manikin, outfitted like a headless Marie Antoinette, as a sentry beside the open door of his bauble- and gadget-filled vault. He dumped a brace of dueling pistols and some rubber Walt Disney rodents into a nest of fancy crinoline gowns. He shoved aside the colonnaded ant plantation, the plaster of Paris saints, the clutch of prosthetic limbs, and the taxidermed beaver with a windup mechanism that caused it to spank a bare-bottomed baby doll with the flat of its tail—arranging them all like witnesses at a nativity. He dragged in a couple of sticker-covered steamer trunks to use as a makeshift catafalque; then “Chop-chop,” Papa clapped his hands and summoned the pallbearers to lumber in with the casket.
The two volunteers especially seemed to be overstating the effort of carrying what was, after all, just an old lady. This was obviously for the sake of sweetening their gratuity, or else it was further evidence of the way that my grandma commanded a gravity beyond her nominal size. In any case, amid universal groaning, they lowered her box too fast. They dropped it onto the steamer trunks in an agitation of dust, which left you expecting them to vanish behind it like magician’s assistants. When the dust cleared and all were accounted for, Papa shooed everybody out of the cage. He tipped the pair of vagrants to get rid of them, though not before shaking their hands, then turned to settle with Mr. Gruber. Meanwhile Oboy had begun to yank at my father’s sleeve.
“This here yo mama’s ticket,” the puller flatly submitted, offering Papa the stub of a receipt stamped with the name of the shop. It was the kind of liberty I’d seen the little whosits take once or twice before, like it needed his involvement to make things official. Like he thought he had to cover for his boss’s oversights. But this time it was the puller who had the wrong idea. An expired bubbe in temporary cold storage shouldn’t be confused with the other superannuated property of Kaplan’s Loans; and I waited for my papa, with his fresh new assertiveness, to notify his employee of said fact.
But instead, Papa took the ticket without hesitation, smiling like he and Oboy were thick as thieves. He even went so far as to give a playful tug at the bill of the puller’s cap, pulling it over his eyes, which Oboy never bothered to correct as he groped away. That’s when I began to worry that my papa’s pack-rat instincts had finally gotten out of control, knowing as I did how an item in Kaplan’s pawn might molder away forever without being redeemed.
When the shop was cleared of vagrants and morticians, and Oboy had reassumed his post outside, Papa went whistling back into his cage and began to reorganize the displaced merchandise. In moments the entire top of the casket was covered with assorted junk, its knotty pine hardly apparent to the uninformed eye. Then, brushing his palms and snatching an eye-shade from a hook, adjusting his necktie by the reflection in a silver serving spoon, my father stepped forth to greet the customers who had started to trickle in.
He began formally, with an unusual reserve—as if, instead of bringing in their worthless goods to pawn, they had come by to pay their last respects. But soon Papa dropped any pretense of formality, succumbing to the infectious high spirits of his clientele. There was one old shvartzer, for instance, a rake-thin, bow-backed regular known as Cousin Jabo, who leaned on his whittled cane to click his heels. “The river she up, and the cotton she down!” he sang out like a password—he might have mistaken our shop for a speakeasy. At the same time his partner, another old scarecrow in a motley of calico patches, shook his bristled head contemplatively. “Unh unh unh,” he opined, “them foty days and nights sho do go fast when you havin fun.” Then both of them started cackling in a way that made you feel like ripe fruit was dropping on your head.
A little later a trio of stout, tight-skirted ladies stationed along the length of an oriental rug, their bottoms graduated according to width, congaed into the shop like a darktown version of a Chinese New Year dragon. After them some joker, whose open dustcoat revealed an old-fashioned bathing costume, came in looking to make, of all things, a purchase. He went away happy after Papa had outfitted him in a full-length diving suit complete with helmet.
The rain had driven everybody out of their minds. In the face of things, the wisest course would naturally have been to crawl into the front window with book in hand, but in the confusion surrounding Zippe’s postponed funeral I’d come unprepared. I was a captive audience. But every so often, on the flimsy excuse of dusting off the show, of passing the time with Oboy, for whom time always seemed to stand still, I ducked out the door. I checked to make sure that the Beale Street bayou had not disappeared before I had the chance to get a proper eyeful.
All that afternoon we heard the sirens. We saw the press gangs of police rounding up errant Negroes for the purpose, as we learned, of sandbagging the levees. A number of refugees from forced labor, undiscouraged by my father, found their way into the shop, and always they brought with them some late-breaking rumor: The water was still rising; there were plans afoot for evacuating the city. The mayor’s council had moved its offices on board the Island Queen, which had slipped its moorings and drifted away. Memphis was without any government. But Beale Street never surrendered to the general alarm. Pawnbrokers and merchants alike stood in their doorways with folded arms, showing themselves prepared to sink or swim. No disaster was so great that it could disrupt their appointed hours of business, nor deter them from an opportunity of turning a profit. And my father no doubt prided himself on being a member of this fraternity.
But around dusk Papa got one of those phone calls from my mother, which usually spelled trouble. From where I stood I could hear her voice over the line, sounding a little like a muted kazoo. Whatever she was demanding, Papa was resisting, trying for all he was worth to pass the buck.
“Listen Mildred, we’re awful busy here,” he protested, his cheeks coloring slightly with shame. “Can’t Morris …? Can’t Dr. Seligman …?”
By now I’d assumed the nature of her summons: Grandpa Isador must have been inconsolable again, his pacification requiring all available hands. That’s why I had to sigh aloud when Papa volunteered, “Okay, I’ll send Harry right over,” as if that settled everything. To my relief the proposal, which had overtones of sacrifice, apparently did not meet my mother’s terms.
While his lips continued to mouth a few more silent but but buts, in the end Papa sulkily conceded to her wishes. With such tender consideration did he remove his sleeve garters and visor that I thought he was going to kiss them, like sacred vestments, before returning them to their respective hooks.
“C’mon Harry.” His voice was approaching a whine. “We got to go home.” It was a pathetic echo of this morning’s rousing call to the funeral. Of course the family ought to be together at the end of such a day, just as we’d been together at the beginning, but the idea of going home now seemed like a kind of defeat. It meant returning to where we’d started, as if everything were the same as before the flood. But if nothing had changed, why was I seized with the impulse to say what I said?
“You go ahead. I’ll stay and mind the shop for a while.”
Papa looked at me like, Whose little boy are you? “Look, it’s Shabbos already,” he pointed out, as if this were supposed to mean something, coming as it did from one who’d told his own father that the Sabbath was a luxury a man of business couldn’t afford. For this I figured “Nu?” was enough of an answer. Then he tried another angle, telling me that my presence would be required to help make a minyan. I asked him since when did the ritual mourning come before the burial, and besides, Jews didn’t sit shivah on Shabbos.
“A k’nocker I got here,” Papa said to the bossed tin ceiling. “Awright, Mr. K’nocker, I ain’t got time to argue.” He gave me a look that I guess was intended to probe my murky depths, then hunched his shoulders to signify that I’d won. But this was too easy. Defiant sons aren’t supposed to overthrow their father’s mandates so handily, are they? And the realization that I’d done just that resulted in my immediate loss of nerve.
My sinking heart, on its way down, passed my papa’s on the rise. With a proud hand on my shoulder, he shrugged again, plucked a wayward thread from my lapel, and tossed me his keys. “Okeydoke, Mr. Big Shot, today you’re a man,” he informed me. “Don’t stay open too late.” And he was out the door in an arpeggio of chimes.
His parting words, however intended, resonated odiously in my ears. They sounded to me like the kind of command you gave some flunky accomplice, that he should stand lookout while you returned to the scene of the crime.
“This is just ducky,” I said to the ceiling, catching myself in an impersonation of my father. Was it fair to say that Sol Kaplan was finally certifiably meshugge? Not happy with having turned his pawnshop into a museum of derelict rubbish, he’d gone himself one better: he’d made it a mausoleum as well.
I resolved to try and make the best of it, though I could have done with a little more in the way of a commencement exercise. What happened to the part where I recited the Moneylender’s Creed? Still, I supposed I was glad Papa hadn’t made a big thing of it. Better that he should treat my taking over as a matter of routine. Because, if I’d thought of it otherwise, at the appearance of my first customer—a sartorial darkie in a bug-back coat, with powder-gray temples and serious, blood-rimmed eyes, carrying what looked to be a grainy black doctor’s bag—I would have panicked.
As it was, I was able to perform before the tired eyes of my audience a quick study of my father’s bluff spirits, screwing my face into what I thought would pass for the spitting image of his benevolent smile.
“Howdy doody,” I greeted, excusing myself to snatch down Papa’s eyeshade. “Now what can I do you for, uncle? Heh heh heh.”
So far so good. This is what’s known as an aptitude for meeting the public. But judging from the suspicious frown on my client’s face, I might have been trying too hard. He was hugging his bag to his chest as if to protect its contents, which I imagined as smoky vials, polished instruments, possibly cunning devices for cracking safes: augers and drills, small explosives, a stethoscope that could sense a mechanical pulse through lead.
“Where Mr. Solly at?”
“He’s out. I’m his son, Mr. Harry,” I informed him, tugging at my lapels to simulate an expansion of my chest. But the old sawbones, or safecracker, still seemed unconvinced. He further confirmed this when, giving a disappointed tilt to his head, he turned and left the shop.
It was a scene that repeated itself, during the next couple of hours, with only slight variations. As you might guess, this took its toll on my readiness to serve. So much was one customer’s reaction the carbon copy of another’s that you’d have thought they’d attended the same school of disappointment. Each one clutched his moth-eaten skunk boa, his cracked hourglass, his still humming beehive, grisly fishing lure, last year’s Dionne quintuplets calendar, or Jose Carioca cookie jar, as if such sought-after items were much too valuable to place in the hands of a novice. Nobody even bothered to tell me a story.
I tried to flatter myself that they could see I wasn’t such a patsy as my papa. I could recognize their offerings for what they really were, “trash” being, to my mind, too dignified a label; and as for the charade of making them loans, that was charity, if you called it by its right name. But knowing this was small consolation in the face of their wholesale distrust. What was the matter with them, that they didn’t identify me as Sol Kaplan’s son and heir, a more or less permanent fixture around these premises? It was also beginning to irk me that Oboy was being so conspicuously out-of-pocket. He was, after all, more suited than I was, by body type and disposition, to caretaking this chamber of curiosities, this shmutzerama. If you asked me, he was born for the job.
Naturally I appreciated the unsolicited corned beef and soda he brought me from Segal’s deli, but what I needed was moral support. Okay, so that wasn’t a service that typically figured among the puller’s duties, but tonight I had the feeling he was leaving me alone on principle. Was this supposed to be some kind of test? If so, I resented it. Here I was, doing my papa this favor, looking out for his interests and all, and what sort of thanks did I get? You couldn’t blame me for feeling a little put upon, confined as I was to this white-elephant graveyard. No wonder I decided to take the first opportunity to close up the shop.
By about eight o’clock (though the reckoning of time in Kaplan’s was always only an educated guess) such traffic as there was had anyway ground to a halt. I supposed that my father’s customers must have put the word out that an imposter was at large in his shop. So I locked the register, closed the account books, and rehung the accessories of the pawnbroker’s trade. Then I switched off the lights and felt my resolution falter.
Though my heart was hinting vigorously that I ought to hurry up, something else made me want to linger. The drowsy glow from my father’s scarlet neon sign was falling over me the way the poppy dust settles over Oz. It was powdering the padded shoulders of the suit coats, enflaming the glass eyes of stuffed animals, highlighting the brass of the instruments, which smoldered as if they were playing red-hot music beyond a pitch that mortals could hear. There was also the quiet, the type that suspicious heroes in cloak-and-daggers call “too quiet.” I felt like an uninvited guest, though I still couldn’t leave. I knew that the instant I stepped out the door, I would have missed my chance to see how the typewriters and pruning hooks, the fretless banjos, the scored china dishes and the birthday spoons, began their secret lives.
I tried to tell myself there was nothing special about this particular brand of quiet; it was just that I’d never been alone in the shop before. Then I remembered that, in a sense, I wasn’t alone.
“Good Shabbos, Grandma Zippe,” I called out half in jest, though of their own accord the words turned reverent in the air. “Aleha ha-sholem,” I thought I’d better add, and by way of further assurance: “You’re in good company. Nothing but the choicest merchandise here at Kaplan’s.” Hoping that Kaplan’s was satisfied at having reduced me to talking to myself, I judged it was time to make tracks.
Outside I unfolded the lattice and locked it, then looked east where the street was a mirage come to life. The lagoon was still bobbing with shadowy skiffs, some of them hung with lanterns on the end of cane poles like fishing rods baited with light. There were reflections that the boat hulls scattered into running schools of electric minnows, and now and again a lanternless boat would scoot by like a dark blade in the air. Despite the persistence of the sirens and the faint, tinny music off in the distance, you could still hear the splashing of oars. Maybe it was because I’d been stuck inside the shop for so long, or maybe I just hadn’t counted on the kind of changes that night would bring, but the scene took me by surprise all over again. You could lose yourself in it if you weren’t careful.
The awning had to be cranked up for the night, a chore I performed so distractedly that I never noticed Oboy sitting beneath it. Consequently, some residual rainwater that had collected in the canvas spilled over, drenching his cap and streaming down both sides of his face. This likened him, in my mind, to a sculpted rainspout on a cathedral.
“Uh-oh,” I think I said as I produced a handkerchief to make a clumsy pass at drying him off. But when he lifted his face, offering me the insoluble riddle of his hatch-marked features, I thought it best to let him tend to himself. I tucked the hankie into his fist, thrust my hands into my pockets, and tried to look casual. “So sorry,” I told him, hoping he’d assure me that these things happen. When he stayed silent, I threw in an apology for the early closing. “Business isn’t so terrific tonight, eh Oboy?” Once spoken, his name seemed to contradict the regret I meant to express. “Oh well, good Shab—I mean, g’night.”
I’d intended to walk away, leaving him to think what he might. That’s why it startled me when, before I’d taken a step, I heard him croak, “You the boss,” as he slid from his perch with a smart salute. Since it was my understanding that only the proprietor had the authority to make the puller budge, it gave me a jolt to see him lurch off like that, as if my wish were his command.
I watched him scurrying down the sidewalk toward the water’s edge and wondered where he went. With a bandy-legged gait that his limp arms did nothing to assist, he looked like something you might throw a net over, then demand he show you his pot of gold. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see him duck down a manhole or nip under a fat lady’s skirts. Or was there a room waiting somewhere, furnished only with a single three-legged stool? Then, jostled by a couple of evening strollers (“Watch yosef, young ge’man!”), I realized that I was following Oboy.
Among the things of this night that I couldn’t previously have pictured was the sight of so remote a character as the puller rubbing shoulders with his own kind. Nevertheless, when he reached the part of the pavement that might now be called the shore, Oboy began saluting here and there, chummily waiting his turn in the boats. In front of him was a sporty fellow in an acey-deucey fedora and a suit with shoulders at least three feet across. He had the arm of an elegant lady, slender as a licorice whip, hair coiled in the shape of an inverted tornado. She was daintily lifting her gown to steady a rocking skiff, pinning its hull under a heel the length of a carpenter’s awl. A burr-headed kid in rolled-up bib overalls, waving the white flag of an unraveled diaper, chased a naked, squealing infant into the shallows. Nearby stood a rag-headed mama shouting threats in the name of the Lord, shaking her muslin parasol like she had a nagging hold of the Lord’s own leg.
All around, the colored people played ducks and drakes with slab bottles and chicken wings. They flirted, swapped insults and shadowboxed, gigged a bullfrog with a brace and bit. In general they behaved as if, rather than a recently materialized wonder of the Western world, this choppy pool of standing water had been there all along.
I had stationed myself behind a lamppost to spy on Oboy and prayed that my jackhammering chest wouldn’t give me away. He was negotiating with a couple of boys, one sitting and one standing in a grounded skiff. Tossing a coin to the standing boy, who snatched it out of the air with a practiced motion, the puller stepped gingerly into the weather-beaten skiff and took a seat. That should have been my cue to turn around and quickly lose myself among the strollers. But in the instant that I hesitated, leading with my receding chin from behind the post, I met Oboy’s eyes through a gap in the gathered ranks.
It was too late. I had no choice but to step out into the circle of light. I stood there foolishly, a bashful debut during which I tried to remember my lines, but all I could manage was “Um, what it was, I mean, the thing I forgot to mention …,” before falling speechless over the nothing I’d forgotten.
Meanwhile the kid who’d taken the coin leaped over the bow onto the pavement, the wind scissoring the tails of his hopsacking coat. Issuing strict orders, apparently to himself (“Heave ho, ya’ll bad man rousterbout! Suck a egg, ol River George!”), he began to shove the boat back into the lagoon. He paused, however, when Oboy, who hadn’t seemed the least bit perplexed by my presence, asked me, “Is you want to ride?”
I looked around like he must have been talking to somebody else, and even pressed an inquiring forefinger to my shirt button. “Oh no,” I assured him, shaking my head emphatically. I couldn’t possibly, had to get back, they were waiting for me on North Main Street, don’t you know. But it was clear that no one was going to go out of his way to persuade me; no one was interested in talking me out of playing coy. In fact, if I hadn’t decided on the spot to hold my breath and hoist my already too short trousers to take the high step over the gunnel, I guess I would have missed the boat.
Before I could sit down, the boy who was still delaying the business of launching put his face uncomfortably close to mine. “Ain’t no free ride on the earth,” he apprised me, turning his head to spit. “Now, take this here ferry, that it a cost you for yo information a nickel.”
“Pardon?” My giddiness combined with his faintly whiskey breath left me slow on the uptake.
“Cost you what we calls the bumper, in yo Negro language, which it are five cent all round the world. What you thank, we in this fo our health?”
I didn’t see why he should have to take a such a high-handed tone with me. This was disrespectful, wasn’t it? Of course it didn’t help to look to Oboy for guidance. You’d have thought it enough that I had stepped into this leaky tub in the first place, never mind I should have to pay for the privilege. Indignant, I saw myself splashing out of the boat and back up the street, then turning to wave goodbye to myself still in the boat, dredging my pocket to grudgingly hand over the whole of my carfare.
“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.
“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.