Read Online Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground by Steve Stern - Free Book Online

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