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

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.
    â€œThis 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