Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground Read Online Free

that if I played my cards right, this whole heap of rubbish could be mine. But despite his whispered disclosures concerning foolproof methods of separating base metal from gold, of measuring the grade of a precious gem by the degree of its luster and so forth, Papa never offered me a single practical demonstration. Words he must have picked up from his colleagues along the street—like “touchstone,” “nitric acid,” “avoirdupois”—he pronounced the way someone else might say “hocus-pocus” or “Shema Yisrael.” He cracked his knuckles like a concert pianist before pressing the keys of his Gilded Age cash register, and stroked the bill of his leather eyeshade like an admiral on a bridge. But it was ten-to-one that he was making it all up as he went along.
    It was all an act to prove the shopworthiness of his new public personality—that’s how I saw it. It was a performance that, for the purposes of authentication, required an audience. And since his customers had to be counted as more or less a part of the act, this was where I came in. So you had to hand it to him, my stagy papa—he could certainly talk a good pawnshop. Nor did I ever see him as fragile at Kaplan’s as he’d appeared that afternoon when he recruited me from North Main. But who did he really think he was kidding? When it came to real life, Kaplan’s Loans had more in common with make-believe.
    Sometimes, if I got fidgety enough, I might be moved to take a little initiative. I might wave a feather duster over the greentinged glass of a display case or the battered bell of a trombone. This earned me the attention of my papa’s puller Oboy, who once or twice had left his post in front of the shop to instruct me in the use of dry mop and broom. Clearly not delighted with my presence on the premises, the runty little shvartzer tolerated me with a stiff impatience. It was apparently more than his job was worth to have to put up with the unskilled likes of such as me.
    A legacy (as Uncle Morris put it) from the previous owner, the pint-sized Oboy sat astride a tall, three-legged stool on the sidewalk outside Kaplan’s Loans. His pinched face, hatched with deep wrinkles like ancient characters on muddy parchment, was perpetually deadpan in the shadow of his nautical cap. The other pullers on Beale Street were smooth-talking jokers in eye-catching outfits who would accost a potential customer just short of assault. They would detain him on the pretext of, say, scrounging a dip of snuff, then hustle him into the shop for some bargain reserved for his exclusive patronage. But not Oboy, who kept mostly mum.
    If he spoke to me at all, it was in brief, gnomic utterances, nuggets such as: “It ain’t a flo wax mo better’n elbow grease.” This kind of advice he croaked in a froggy voice whose tone I didn’t think he should have taken with the boss’s son. So maybe he resented the way I’d begun to usurp some of his duties—not that I could even have told you what his duties were, since they were every bit as vague as my own. Resentful or not, you’d have thought from the way he behaved that I was distracting the puller from more pressing concerns.
    He sat on his stool like a watcher in a crow’s nest instead of a professional shmoozer there to entice the passers-by. In his lumpish rigidity he put me in mind of a stone monkey in front of the ruined temple described in The Lost Jewels of Opar . He was more like the guardian of the shop than its employee.
    And I was the license that Papa’d required to abandon himself entirely to the ritual of running his pawnshop. To the bizarre items of merchandise that had begun to fill his shelves, my father now gave his undivided attention. The only reason I didn’t feel more out of place was that my afternoons in Kaplan’s weren’t so dissimilar from afternoons in my alcove above North Main. Nestled