Soon Lucifer was back to his old tricks. He began to look a little less chapfallen, actually going so far as to change his socks and rake the lint out of his rough-dried hair. He readjusted the tilt of his cap, smoothed the crease at its bill, and put some hip-slung strut back into his walk. I even saw him pick at a plate of head cheese to keep up his strength. But his face remained sere, the skin stretched too tight over a skull too large. Startlingly haggard, he looked, oddly enough, more unlike his twin brother than ever, whose cadaverousness was somehow becoming. What’s more, the wise guy’s schemes for retrieving his brother from the brink of a Gadarene rapture lacked something of his trademark pizazz. They were measures that seemed more suited to curing the kid of hiccups than saving him from a fever that threatened to burn him alive.
Still, I went along with his shenanigans, while the ticket holders mistook us for a part of the act. Rather than discourage this, we found it more convenient to play a little to the crowd. Holding fast Michael’s jaws, for instance, I would ham it up a bit, like a man wrestling an alligator. Lucifer, meanwhile, would probe his brother’s throat with a number of devices, not the least implausible of which was a feather. This he withdrew and examined with a clinical intensity, as if he expected words to cling to it the way doodlebugs cling to spit on a weed. He filled a syringe with a vinegar and chili powder solution, and squirted it up the dummy’s nose, then pinched his nostrils till he sputtered like a backfiring engine. But this only resulted in momentarily redirecting Michael’s verbal discharge, sharpening the taint in the already noxious air.
Abandoning the idea of physical insult as a remedy, Lucifer turned to psychological terror. We rolled newspapers into dunce caps and draped ourselves in sheets with eye holes. Then we made a cross out of the broomstick that Aunt Honey had broken over the head of a defaulting customer, and set fire to it at the foot of the dummy’s bed. While this created quite a stir among the spectators, it made no particular impression on Michael at all. Nor did the noose that we hung from the light cord, though its sinister shadow alerted Lucifer to the possibilities of shadow play. So we turned the sheets into a screen, behind which we projected—with the help of gnarled fingers and a predatory-looking phonograph arm—what we hoped would appear to be monsters. The monsters turned up in Michael’s driven soliloquy, where they were vanquished one by one. Instead of shocking him out of his obsession, we seemed only to be giving him more food for thought.
We then embarked on a course of comic distraction, Lucifer having scrounged a pair of Aunt Honey’s pajamas. Helping me into one leg, he climbed into the other. Unable to coordinate our effort, however, we couldn’t even manage to stumble bilaterally, and splitting our mutual crotch, we fell apart. While the audience was nonetheless amused, our performance was entirely lost on Michael, who had never been known for his sense of humor.
But Lucifer was still sold on the idea of a theatrical solution. The problem was that the entertainments he suggested involved absurdly elaborate staging. They required effects—cloud-borne galleons, the interiors of twisters, blind leaps from casement windows—as impossible as the dummy’s own sick fancies. In fact, they were the dummy’s own sick fancies. Where Michael was taking some of his cues from our antics, Lucifer had now begun to borrow inspiration from Michael’s flights. A kind of brotherly cross-pollination was at work, the theory being that, by performing the figments of his mind before the dummy’s eyes, you could exorcise his festering brain. You could turn out its contents like pockets, and afterwards, with Michael’s head empty again, peace would be restored.
I couldn’t help wondering where the wise guy got off thinking amateur theatrics would work when his brother had already swallowed such gruesome home remedies with scarcely a burp. Still, it wasn’t for me to sound the note of discouragement, though in the end I didn’t have to. In the middle of concocting one of his unstageable charades (“Mistah Harry, y’all can play like you done catch a mighty fish, splits him open an it’s Snowpea up inside, play like a queen”) Lucifer seemed to hear himself talking. He came down with a clunk and was dismal once more.
I was confused when I returned the next evening to find him all fired up again, and with a vengeance. Intercepting me on the stairs, he was rattling on about something he’d read in the papers. Since when did the wise guy read the papers? His professed expertise in most areas notwithstanding, I was no longer so sure that Lucifer could read at all. But here he was, citing a certain item that made urgent claims on his attention, something to do with a high-society banquet.
“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 check-in 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.
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. Once 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?
Maybe he thought it was better to be empty-handed, gesticulating like an idiot, when you pleaded your case before a royal court. The sight was astonishing enough in itself, but even more remarkable, if the pert tilt of her head was any indication, was that the queen seemed actually amused. This went for Lamar IV as well, who’d arranged his squiffy features to approximate concentration, leaning forward lest he miss a word. Several other members of the court within hearing did likewise, all of them beaming with rapt indulgence at the nervy kid.
Had I been guilty of having too little faith? Come to think of it, why shouldn’t Lucifer’s patter, which worked so well on the street, be even more persuasive up here in the thinner air? Who said Michael’s situation couldn’t have a happy conclusion? Once convinced of the philanthropic import, what was to prevent this shining entourage from rising en masse and making an impromptu royal progress down Third Street from the Peabody to the Baby Doll Hotel? Surely stranger things had happened.
Maybe I’d sold her short, this mistress of Michael’s dreams. Maybe she was a lady of charity and social concern who was personally not above slumming. She was the ultimate good sport. Or was it just that she was easily amused? Because, in the midst of the cheeky kid’s song and dance, she seemed, just as easily, to have become bored. Whatever interest she’d taken in Lucifer’s performance had evidently run its course. Unburdening herself of a sigh, she looked suddenly testy, her expression degenerating into an impatience bordering on outrage. Turning sharply to the left and right, she signaled that the joke had gone far enough: it was time for someone to remove the offense. This was when Lucifer chose to fall to his knees.
Almost simultaneously I heard a piercing shriek from the table beside me. I went so far as to utter an audible “Nu?” but still couldn’t bring myself to look. Then I looked. A small enamel bowl, slid from my tray, had plopped upended onto the pale, strapless shoulder of a garlanded debutante.
“What’s that!” she cried (a little irrationally, I thought), twisting her neck to watch rills of mayonnaise plunging down the close-pored slope of her décolletage. Because it was all I could do to be literal under the circumstances, and meaning no disrespect, I politely informed her, “It looks like slaw.”
A vein pulsed in her velvet-chokered neck, and she flushed a color that, even in the failing light, rivaled the red of the overhead lanterns. She plucked the bowl from her shoulder like some gross sucking insect and slammed it down on the table in disgust. With his napkin her escort assaulted the little mound of coleslaw that remained perched on her bare shoulder blade. As if he’d knocked off a chip that she’d placed there in defiance, this only served to rekindle her wrath. Looking around for some further means of expressing her vexation, she raised herself to give me a stinging slap across the cheek. She shrieked again to see how my complexion had come off on the palm of her hand.
Her escort got to his feet to take charge, then looked like he wasn’t sure what he was taking charge of. Inclining his head, which was the pink of strawberry ice cream in the inverted cone of his party hat, he frowned as he examined my cheek. I could feel how the young lady’s fingers must have left their half-chevron of parallel markings, which the gent seemed to find familiar but couldn’t quite place. He leaned back for a better appraisal, giving my nostrils a rest from his essence of Wild-root and Sen-Sen. Then he folded his arms across his belly, cradled snugly in the sling of a watered silk cummerbund.
“We wheel get to the bottom a thee-us, son,” he said, drawling so mellifluously that I couldn’t tell whether he meant to threaten or console. Nevertheless he seemed pleased with himself, as if he’d spoken for all honorable men. He was building toward such a fine indignation that it was almost a shame to see him so upstaged, but at that moment the debacle behind the royal table had captured the attention of the entire banquet.
Lucifer had finally gone too far. He’d grabbed Queen Marva June by the arm—intending what? To topple her from her throne and drag her out by the hair? With the kind of hold usually associated with victims of drowning, one of the waiters had locked his hands around Lucifer’s chest. He was lifting the kid from his knees in an effort to detach him from the white woman. It was an action repeated from his side by King Lamar himself, who, without leaving his chair, had taken advantage of her predicament to embrace his beleaguered queen about the bust. He was himself clasped from behind by a concerned peer of the realm, a spruce young man who looked as if he in turn wanted assistance—someone to help him hang on to the king, or at least to correct the cant of his bow tie. It was a full-fledged tug-of-war, in the middle of which stood the moonlighting mayor of Beale Street, his comportment, as ever, unimpeachable. Trying to pry loose the colored kid’s fingers from the lady’s alabaster wrist, he might have been presiding at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. His attitude suggested it was all in a night’s work.
Meanwhile the harried young queen was no longer making a pretense of self-control. Her eyes were utterly given over to horror. Her immoderate whoops and yelps had stopped the band.
So this was it, the absurd and pathetic end of the wisenheimer’s once illustrious career. Oh Lucifer, that it should have come to this! The banquet guests would no doubt agree that lynching was too good for him. They would probably pull him to pieces, like the popular musician in one of my cousin’s stories, with their bare hands. They would afterwards wear his dried parts, the party favors from this red-letter occasion, as lucky charms on their bracelets and key chains. Thus resigned to the worst that might befall him, I watched helplessly as the twin was made to let go of the object of his brother’s desire. I saw, though it didn’t sink in, how he wrenched himself out of the clutches of his would-be captors, leaving his empty jacket in their hands. It wasn’t until he’d hotfooted it past me, chiding, “Mistah Harry, you slow as mule blood!” on the way, that I understood Lucifer had broken free.
Taking heart, I said so long to my serving tray, which I let fall with a resounding clatter to the patio tiles. Before I had managed to jar myself into motion, however, I was overtaken by a pack of puffing gentleman guests. Galloping after the wise guy, they were throwing off any impediments to speed, shedding tuxedo jackets and sashes, letting paper hats fly where they might. Several of the waiters, dispatched by their captain, had also sprinted forward. They kicked out their legs in suspiciously stylized strides, after a fashion that looked more suited to a cakewalk than to giving chase. But even they had a head start on me in pursuing the twin.
This is not to say that anyone was close to catching him. Making a beeline across the footlighted dance floor, he swerved only to avoid one of the escorts (who, in his attempt to tackle the elusive twin, had skidded on his boiled shirtfront across the floor). He hurtled a railing and cut across a corner of the mock-up piazza while band members snatched their instruments out of his way. Shagging it over the gravel that bordered the formal terrace, he lifted his knees like he might be about to take flight—and did. He bounded into the air, landing kerplunk on the tin-plated parapet that surrounded the hotel roof.
Backlit now by the huge neon sign straddling the hotel’s opposing wings, Lucifer struck his stance so purposefully—jerking his cap out of a back pocket to pull it on—that the host of pursuers were brought to a sudden halt.
I figured that this was a calculated effect. What was also calculated was the way that he looked behind him toward oblivion, then back toward the hostile mob, as if weighing alternatives. The kid sometimes pushed make-believe to such lengths, though, that you couldn’t tell it from the real thing. My kishkes having tied themselves in knots, I cried out, “Don’t you dare!”
But mine was not so dissimilar from all the other angrily raised voices. Apparently set on preventing him from cheating them out of his retribution, the banquet guests were bellowing in varying degrees of rancor. Much as I wanted to reach the kid, like everyone else I was glued to the spot. Still, I was a little encouraged that, while I couldn’t see his face too clearly, I thought I could make out a trace of his devilish grin. Then he turned his back on the whole affair and was gone.
My ribs slammed shut like a trap sprung over my heart. Surging forward along with the gentleman guests, who cautioned their dates to stay put, I stumbled over the gravel to the parapet. Leaning against the bird-fouled tin for support, I hid my face in my hand. I was in no hurry to look down the long stories toward the crumpled body at the bottom of the shaft. Flanked as I was on either side by irate tuxedos, I still thought I could hear him calling: “Mistah Harry, you bout to miss the boat!”
I uncovered my eyes, though my brain took its time in corroborating what they saw. He was waving his cap at me from a fire escape catty-corner to the Plantation Roof, across a chasm some ten feet below.
“You birdbrain!” I started to yell at him. “You pinhead stovelid jungle-bunny momzer coon!” I was that glad to see him. Removing my glasses to wipe my eyes, I delivered myself of a gut-wrenching sob. I clutched the wall again, braced against the event of some joker’s congratulating me on a fine choice of epithets. But everyone else was too busy spitting curses of their own.
That’s when I began to think—as the wise guy still waited, urging me to take the leap—that I wasn’t so glad to see Lucifer after all. He had some nerve inviting me to risk my neck, especially when I could just as easily stay where I was, under cover of the general acrimony. Across my cheek I could still feel the debutante’s smarting handprint, exposing me as neither one thing nor another. If I wanted, I’d have bet I could back up crabwise into the kitchen; I could wipe off the blackface, put on a funny hat, and come out to join the party. Having passed for a darkie, I could certainly impersonate my own kind, more or less.
Lucifer shrugged a mighty shrug and started down the fire escape alone. Myself, I began to slink backwards, meaning to take advantage of the foofooraw and disappear. But what I was doing, I was coming to my senses, I was losing my mind—take your pick. I was backing up to give myself room to take a run at the wall.
While you couldn’t exactly say I bounded onto it, I got a leg up just the same. I raised myself slowly until I was standing erect on the tin, which shuddered like distant thunder from my trembling. I was leaning out over dizzy nothing, shouting at Lucifer to hold his horses, wishing that someone would for God’s sake stop me before I did something rash. They should try and stop me if they dared.
Then my legs were churning in midair for a purchase. My waiter’s jacket billowed about me, providing resistance (I could have sworn it) against the velocity of my descent. How else could you explain the way that drop seemed to last some considerable fraction of forever? Long enough for people gazing out of hotel windows to remark in passing the nearly aerodynamic boy.
I hit the steel slats of the fire escape with a brain-shuddering ping-ing-ng, my legs collapsing under me, knees striking the platform studs, which tore my pants. Frantically I set about taking stock of my broken bones, of which there seemed so far to be none, though my knees could have used a little first aid. “Mistah Harry,” came the voice of patience under pressure, and I looked up to find Lucifer standing a couple of steps below me, offering me his hand. Still somewhat addled from my landing, I thought he wanted to give me an amiable shake, mazel tov on the occasion of having made such a valiant leap. But no sooner had I extended my own hand than he latched on to my arm, and for the umpteenth time that evening—indifferent to my abrasions and before I could even get properly to my feet—the wise guy began to drag me in a blind rush behind him.
Only this time there was a difference: instead of pushing deeper into trouble, we were making good our escape. Realizing this left me silly. It tickled me further that the guests were continuing to hurl abuse, which rained over us as harmlessly as ticker tape. As I banged down the steps behind Lucifer, sliding along the railing on my belly whenever I could, I was seized with uncontrollable laughter.
At the bottom of fifteen ringing flights, a horizontal staircase tipped us gently into the street, where we were discharged like a pair of wobbling dreidels. Even from that far below the hotel roof, you could hear the band cranking up another tune—the old standard “Bye-Bye Blackbird,” if I wasn’t mistaken. Then we were beating it down Third Street, the music growing ever fainter, diffusing into the surfy sounds of traffic like an orchestra on a sinking ship.
We didn’t slow down until we’d reached an alley off of Gayoso Street, where we practically fell out, winded from our dash. Leaning against a wall, I kept on cackling—between healthy gulps of air—over the amazing handiness of our escape. Now that we were clear of it, the whole episode seemed to have been one colossal hoot. Shvitzing buckets, I tore off my waiter’s jacket and began to wipe my face, then cracked up again at the sight of the jacket smeared with black stains.
Bent over, panting, hands braced on his knees, Lucifer resisted joining me in my hilarity. Full of fellow feeling, however, I stepped over and gave him a friendly slap on the back. Instantly he began to whoop it up with an abandon that put my own wheezing laughter to shame. He heaved and quaked, hugging himself to keep from splitting his sides. It took me a minute to understand that this was not a happy noise he was making, that the wise guy was bawling desolately.
“I have done fail!” he cried out at length. “It a judgment on me, I done rurnt what ain’t never be fix!” He began to curse himself, striking his forehead with the heel of his hand, increasing the cadence with every name he called. “I’se a mosshead…gator bait…suck-hind-tit…eight rock…momzer…coon!” Then he turned and banged his head against the brick wall. Here, as if he’d decided that this was the ticket, he backed up a couple of paces, about to repeat the process with a running start.
I grabbed him by the belt loop and reeled him in. Flinging my arms around him from behind, I locked my fingers over his chest as I’d seen them do at the banquet. Quite honestly, I was embarrassed for all his carrying-on, not to say revolted by the combination of tears and snot dripping onto my sleeve. Beyond spoiling the fun, he was blubbering so woefully I was afraid I might break down and blubber too.
But I hung on just the same, squeezing with all my might until he stopped trying to pull away. I squeezed the last squeak of caterwauling out of his system, until he’d subsided into hiccupping sobs, then silence. It was almost too easy, Lucifer’s surrender, and I wondered why, back before it was finally too late, we hadn’t tried the same maneuver on his brother.
Not without a feeling of getting even for all the shoving I’d endured that night, I pushed the docile wise guy in the direction of the Baby Doll Hotel, then made tracks back to North Main Street in record time. I collected my schoolbooks from under a box hedge in Market Square Park and entered the apartment reading aloud from a biology text. I turned my head neither left nor right to see who might be home. Walking straight to my alcove, I made my voice—ad-libbing now about lipids, which I may have confused with limpets—manifestly drowsy. Then I nipped out the window into the nodding mimosa tree.
Back at the Baby Doll, Lucifer had retired to his miserable corner again, and as for Michael, he didn’t look quite so beatific anymore. Now, when you looked at him, you might think to yourself: If this is love, kaynehoreh, keep it away from me. His fluttering eyelids were ragged as chewed thumbnails, and his cheekbones, above their deep hollows, had the bleached appearance of old rubber. His body in its dirty nightshirt was an empty hand puppet. For all the tender attentions of the ladies, never mind the adoration of the gawkers, the dummy showed no signs of pulling out of his decline.
His voice, after more than a week’s worth of uninterrupted prattle, was reduced to the drone of a tiny faltering motor. Sometimes his visitors had to put their ears so close to him that you’d have thought they were listening for a heartbeat instead of words. But usually he was audible enough, and extravagant as ever in eulogizing his beloved. He stalked her through his relentless imaginings, conceiving whole Baedekers of peoples and places along the way—describing territories that, while they’d certainly never figured in his experience, could neither be accounted for by the breadth of his reading. Such an alphabet soup poured out of him that I sometimes pictured Michael’s mouth as a shofar from which tumbled something like the contents of Kaplan’s Loans.
He showered his sweetheart with gifts, cloaked her in fabrics and anointed her with scents gathered from the place where Beale Street intersected (let’s say) farthest Bong Tree Land. He tracked her into terra incognita, where standard-hung castle walls beetled over sharecroppers’ shacks and jungle escarpments were terraced in cotton rows, where the Mississippi Delta flowed into the Sea of Tranquillity. He called upon a legendary lost tribe of hoofers and the devil’s brother-in-law to come to his aid, and saints from outside any recognized canon, with names like Ribeye and Mandrake Willie. But necromantic intervention notwithstanding, the erstwhile dummy was often heard to complain that he was losing sight of his queen. These days she seemed to give him the slip at every turn.
It made you want to shake him, especially when you knew what she was made of, and say, “Michael, shmuck, get wise to yourself!” But the more I listened to the kid’s sick fancies, the more I believed he was only half mad. The other half was making some kind of a deathbed confession that it would have been a sin to muffle up.
Now that the entire neighborhood had shelled out their hard-earned wages to view him, the spectator business had finally begun to fall off. Moreover, since the kid’s voice had lost much of its volume, the gawkers were growing impatient, if not bored, with the trouble it took to hear him. There was also the matter of his physical deterioration, the way his delirium no longer seemed to transfigure his mumbling bones. This everyone found plainly depressing. As a consequence, though never really resigned to the fact that his value as a meal ticket had come and gone, Aunt Honey gave up her promotional activities. She’d settled, along with her ladies, into going through the motions of restoring his health, or at least making him comfortable.
Still, you had the steadfast few who kept coming back. Paying the recently devalued admission fee of a nickel, they bent their heads low as they entered the room. Sometimes they came bearing little offerings—personal photographs, jars of preserves, which lay strewn around the bed alongside the broken books. They brought snacks in grease-stained bags and, since nobody bothered with the time limit anymore, folding chairs. Numbered among these diehards was a blade-thin church sexton, always with a lady’s stocking on his head. He sat and dribbled his knee like a bouncing ball, horselaughing and exclaiming, “Tha’s a good’n,” as if the dummy were reciting some comical shtick. A stout woman with berries in her hat, who never came without her knitting, would steady her needles from time to time to cup an ear, then proceed at a vigorous clip like she was stitching dictation.
I wanted to ask them what they thought they were doing now that Michael’s lovesong was failing, its words little more than a rattle. Were they waiting for the final extinguishment of the fever that still lit his blasted features? Or did they think that, after it had consumed his body for kindling, Michael’s fever might burn on with an enduring life of its own? It might, once it was no longer confined to the bones of a solitary sick kid, torch the Baby Doll in a bonfire that would spread to the rest of Beale. It would ignite the oily surface of the new lagoon, devour the hill of pawnshops, and advance over those parts of the earth that remained unflooded.
A couple of nights after our Hotel Peabody caper, there was a new wrinkle on the scene—or, rather, a whole sack of wrinkles in the shape of a very old man. In his antiquated getup (celluloid collar and Edwardian serge, beribboned pince-nez) he was seated before a panel of machinery that flickered with tiny bulbs, their orange filaments possibly lit by something predating electricity. He was jotting notes, fiddling with wires, spinning reels that apparently needed cranking by hand. Meanwhile Aunt Honey loomed in the hallway, showing him off.
He was, as she would have us know, an esteemed professor of an unpronounceable discipline from the local Negro college. For a modest sum, which she wasn’t too modest to broadcast to her girls, she’d allowed him to install his equipment to the exclusion of any further visitors.
“The fessor here,” she boasted, laying a hand on his brittle shoulder, which appeared to dislocate, “he own put the Baby Doll on the map. Gon prove siren-tific that a nigger have got a soul.”
I squatted beside Lucifer, who had himself been evicted from the sickroom and was slumped on the floor of the hall. He didn’t have to say anything, I knew what he was thinking. So why didn’t he rouse himself and put his foot through the infernal contraption? But weary, hanging his head like his brain was some ponderous stone, Lucifer didn’t seem to be Lucifer anymore. He was so gray about the gills now that, outside the Baby Doll, he would have been hard to recognize. When at last he spoke, you’d have thought he was repeating a hypnotist’s suggestion, his voice—even less audible than his brother’s—carrying no conviction at all.
“This am the finalest straw,” he said to his feet. He removed his cap and began to massage his patchy scalp, muttering like someone trying to read a barely legible sign. It was high time, was what he haltingly said, for a seat-of-your-britches strategy.
“Just what would you call the Peabody?” I wanted to know.
Beyond taking in any sensible remarks, Lucifer muttered on. He was still stuck on the idea that the queen of the Cotton Carnival’s fleshly presence was the only antidote to his brother’s ills. Since appeals hadn’t worked and kidnap was out of the question, involving as it did such overwhelming technical concerns, there was only one course left open to us: “See, we gots to carry him round where she stay…”
I could imagine what he intended—how we would transport the gibbering Michael on a litter to her ancestral mansion, then abandon him on her colonnaded doorstep for her to find. Or maybe she should come upon him more haphazardly—say, floating in her lily pond. A note would be pinned to his swaddling clothes assuring one and all that despite his damaged appearance he was a gift fit for a queen. The joke had gone far enough. It was time to call a spade, excuse me, a spade.
“Lucifer,” I interrupted him, “what do you think? I mean, what do you really think would happen if Michael ever met his—what was her name? Marvy June?”
But Lucifer only looked at me like any shnook would know. “Why, Mistah Harry,” he said patiently. “Do them meet up, Mistah Harry, she own be b’wootch jus like him. She lie down an die if she ain’t be the mystifyin Michael’s solid good thang.”
For a split second I was almost taken in. Then I couldn’t contain my aggravation anymore. If I’d ever humored the kid, I was sorry, and resolved to make amends.
“You don’t believe that!” I accused him, loud enough (I hoped) to penetrate his thick skull. “If you believe that”—I pointed toward the sickroom—“then you’re as crazy as he is! If they met up, I’ll tell you what she’d do. She’d call the cops is what!”
The first to drop were his tired eyes, followed instantly by the collapse of his puckered chin. Then his shoulders sagged, and had I bothered to blow in his direction, I could probably have crumbled the rest of him like a house of cards. So I guessed that I’d reached him. Of course this was nothing I hadn’t seen before; in fact, it was getting to be almost a matter of routine. It was another of his ploys, I suspected, meant to sucker me into feeling sorry for him.
“And don’t think I feel sorry for you either,” I was suddenly moved to add, though he was evidently too absorbed in self-pity to hear me.
To look at him, you might have thought that he and his brother were suffering from two unidentical halves of the same disease. It was a case of the draykopf following the dummkopf into hopeless insensibility, unless somebody hurried up and turned him around. Somebody who was wise to the wise guy, cagey enough to pull the leg puller’s leg. And just who would you suppose that somebody might be?
Over the whir and click of the professor’s machinery, you could still occasionally make out some babbled phrase of Michael’s: the lady was trapped in a topaz stickpin on a take-out man’s lapel; she was spinning the smoke from Pee Wee’s back room into her bridal veil. Inwardly I petitioned the Lord of Grandpa Isador to help me help His servant Lucifer, who, come to think of it, had saved yours truly from dying a bookworm. Then it came to me, a brainstorm, an idea so implausible as to bear the authentic stamp of Lucifer’s own peculiar brand of folly.
“Listen,” I said, “this is what we’ll do. We’ll get hold of my cousin Naomi. She’s not so hard to look at, my cousin, and we can dress her up all farputz—you know, like a regular queen. Then we’ll introduce her to Michael. Don’t all white girls look the same to you people? He’ll think she’s the genuine goods and it’ll bring him around. It’ll work, you’ll see. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know.”
Having said as much, I found myself wondering, Why not? After all, Michael was already so far gone, what was the difference? One thing was as likely to snap him out of it as another—not that I really believed that anything would snap him out of it. Still, you couldn’t overlook a certain sympathy between the dummy and my cousin. Though they might not know it, they were actually two of a kind, both of them addled in their respective ways by their sick yen for stories. There was something almost star-crossed in my idea of bringing them together, something that brought out the matchmaker in me. Anyway, what could it hurt? It was certainly no more harebrained a scheme than Lucifer’s, and not nearly so hazardous. At the worst, Michael would only ignore Naomi the way he did everyone else; on the other hand, you never knew but I might be doing them both a favor. Not to mention the mitzvah I’d be doing the wise guy into the bargain. It was worth a try.
Lucifer’s response was slow in coming. Having raised his raw pink eyes to mine, he gazed at me swimmingly like a drunk, like he was seeing double and the images refused to resolve themselves. In the end, however, the two Harry Kaplans must have merged into one, because Lucifer relaxed, and, like a wedge of moon dredged out of dark water, his old reliable grin began to reappear. Then he pinched my cheek and gave me a convivial cuff on the ear with his cap. He jumped up and slapped the cap against his hip, dancing a few steps of an impromptu buck-and-wing.
“Mistah Harry,” he declared with a jubilation that my gut greeted with righteous fear, “sometime I gin to thank you ain’t so dumb.”