Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground by Steve Stern

Author:Steve Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Harry Kaplan’s Adventures Underground
ISBN: 9781937854133
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1991-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Nine

Just because I’d had to go to such lengths to keep up my part as librarian didn’t mean I still wasn’t having fun. Since my father seemed to have forgotten all about grooming me for his successor, my association with the pawnshop was no more than nominal. Nowadays I considered myself an apprentice confidence artist or an aspiring “sweet man,” which is a kind of outlaw shadchen who makes matches at hourly rates. I had begun to take a studious interest in Lucifer’s so-called errands, though it was often difficult to distinguish between the official ones and the ones he’d trumped up for a lark. Business and pleasure were such near relations, by his lights, that you could almost have called them twins. In any case, these errands involved such a variety of destinations that we were never at a loss for excitement or for excuses to make expeditions beyond the immediate vicinity of the Baby Doll Hotel.

On the strength of a whispered complaint from one of the ladies, for instance, we might be sent after graveyard dirt, popularly known as goofer dust. This, along with certain bodily discharges and the bones of black cats—not to mention the gris-gris made from the devil’s dandruff and imported from New Orleans—was an essential ingredient in recipes for casting spells. To get it we would make a moonlit trek to the potter’s field behind the bayou, where Lucifer maintained that the twins’ mama was buried. This was a pretty safe bet, since the weathered wooden markers bore only numbers instead of names. (Not that it would have mattered, since Aunt Honey—the only available source of information concerning their birth—never managed to recollect the same surname for the brothers twice. As for their mother’s given name, it was sometimes Junipurr, occasionally Beulah Love or Nectarine. Their father was always John.) Also, I noticed that Lucifer seldom led us to the same grave site, that it varied according to his disposition like odds in a policy game. Nevertheless, he took every least occasion to steer us through the lot, never failing to place some dandelions or a sprig of chicory on a grave.

Another place where it was said you could find the really vintage dirt was across the river at the old slave burial ground on President’s Island. One night in a “borried” johnboat, with both brothers paddling furiously while I bailed with a coffee tin, we actually attempted the rough passage. Before the current turned us back, we saw how the cemetery had been desecrated by the flood. How the high water had performed a kind of postmortem emancipation, robbing the graves of their rotting cypress caskets, setting them free in a bobbing skeleton fleet.

Sometimes we might be sent to the root doctor after the cure for a lady’s ailment, such as the bedevilment or the piss-out-of-a-dozen-holes disease. We might be sent after the remedy for having swallowed (as they say) a watermelon seed. Frequently we were endowed for these journeys with some article

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