Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  Archy returned to Chan, ready with a reply. “Do I have a choice?” he said.

  “Of course,” Flowers said mildly, so mildly that Archy at once regretted his words and wished to retract them. Paranoid, imagining shit, guns and undercurrents. Come at the man sounding flip and disrespectful.

  “If this is a bad time,” Flowers said, “I’m happy to—”

  “Nah, no,” Archy said, “just kidding. Let’s do it.”

  “Fine.”

  “You were saying about Mr. Jones.”

  “I was. Now, I’m sure Brother Singletary already told you, but Mr. Jones took care of everything, from the financial point of view and also in the matter of choices and selections.”

  “Everybody knew that.” Singletary turning out to be Mr. Jones’s executor, fingers in every pie not already fingered up by Chandler Flowers. “I mean, shit, for a while he was carrying around a picture of his coffin folded up into his wallet, used to take it out and smile at it like he was looking at a centerfold or, like, a picture of Tahiti.”

  “Mr. Jones, rest in peace, the man had his certain type of peculiarity, no doubt.”

  “Asking to be buried in the Aztec number,” Archy said. “I heard.”

  “Thing is hell of ugly,” Feyd said.

  “The Aztec number was made by Ron Postal of Beverly Hills,” Archy said, grateful for the opportunity, as an alternative to adolescent slouching and mouthing off, to turn professorial and school the roostery motherfucker. “Acknowledged master of the American leisure suit. It’s truly one of a kind. Shit ought to be in the Smithsonian.”

  “People can be very particular about burial attire,” Flowers said with all his perfected mildness. “No, the odd thing, what I’m talking about, maybe odd’s not the proper term. I was going through his instructions, you know, he has it all typed up single-spaced, six pages.” He opened a folder on his desk, forest green with hooks of white metal where you hung it from rails in the file drawer. With the tip of his middle finger, hardly larger than a boy’s, he began to tick off items on the first sheet of paper the folder contained. “He wanted the Cadillac hearse.”

  “Naturally,” Archy said.

  “Naturally. And we’re going to make that happen for him. He wanted it open casket—”

  “How’s he look?”

  “Now? Now he looks peaceful and dignified.”

  “No sign of, uh, damage?”

  “This is our art, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “Our profession. Please. Man wanted the Chinese marching band, the Green Street Mortuary Band, from over in the city.” He looked up from the folder. “How’s that coming?”

  “Turns out they’re already booked,” Archy said. “Morning and afternoon.”

  “That is going to be a problem, then,” Flowers said.

  “Please,” Archy said. He had been trading messages with Gwen’s receptionist, Kai, to see about booking her outfit, Bomp and Circumstance, to play the funeral parade. Mr. Jones had checked them out one time at the Temescal street fair. Bunch of straight-faced, brass-brandishing cute little tattooed lesbianettes playing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” wasn’t ever going to have too much trouble putting a smile on Mr. Jones’s face. “This is my art and my profession.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “So I’m still waiting for the points that have come up,” Archy said. “In the fine print.”

  “Well,” Flowers said, “the gentleman, rest his soul, he had an aversion, you might say, to religion. I’m sure you know.”

  “He was deep, though.”

  “Yes, he was. But he made it clear,” tapping the third typed sheet of paper in the green folder, “he didn’t want a preacher or a minister, didn’t want no church. Didn’t even want to hold the service here at the funeral home. What with the stained glass and, I guess, the pews in the chapels and so on. We got Bibles, we got hymnals. A general atmosphere of, call it, reverent solemnity. I mean, I try to keep the religious element unobtrusive, respectful. Technically, this is a secular operation. But, well, they are called funeral chapels, and Mr. Jones—”

  “He was a true-blue atheist,” Archy said. “I remember my pops saying how Mr. Jones, at one time he was even a full-on Communist.”

  “How is Luther?” Flowers said, tired, uninterested, milder than ever. Asking it pro forma. But one pop-eye peeper flicked left, checking in on Bankwell, telling the man, You pay attention, now.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Archy said.

  “You haven’t seen him?”

  “Not for like two years. What he do this time?”

  “Didn’t do anything,” Chan Flowers said. “I never said he did.”

  “But you’re looking for him,” Archy said. “I get the distinct impression.”

  “I might be.”

  “If you’re looking for him,” Archy said, “he must of done something.”

  A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, at the bottom of Flowers’s face. Archy did not know the nature of the ancient beef that Chan Flowers had with Luther Stallings. The history of the matter was banned and obscure. His aunties had made inquiries, put out feelers. For years they continued to probe the gossip pits, turn over the ashes with their sticks. But even those legendary connoisseurs of scandal never found anything to definitively explain the break, apart from whispers of a connection to some mythic murder of the Panther years. As boys, Archy knew, Chan and Luther had been famously thick, chronic co-conspirators. Then, when Archy was maybe four or five years old, around the time Luther started acting in movies, the friendship was abandoned like a house, sealed by law, condemned.

  “Whatever he did, I assume it is all his fault,” Archy said. “Let me just put that out there to start.”

  “You may well be right,” Flowers said. “Luther may have done something, and whatever he did is probably, I’m sorry to say, his fault. But that’s not here nor there. I just need to see the man. I just need to talk to him.”

  There was a photograph that Archy remembered, hung from the wall of his father’s various apartments. It was a glossy black and white, taken by a Tribune photographer, at an Oakland Tech dance, Luther Stallings and Chan Flowers and two fly girls of the period. Everybody dolled up and smiling but possessing that precocious dignity of your ancestors when they were young.

  “If I knew where he was at, Councilman, I would tell you, straight up,” Archy said. “But I don’t know. By choice. And I don’t plan to find out.”

  “And you don’t know anybody knows where he’s living. Not one single soul.”

  He might have been gently chiding Archy for this ignorance. Implying there could, somewhere, for somebody, still be some use left in Luther Stallings.

  “Nope. No, sir, no, I don’t.”

  “Well, let’s say that situation changes, or maybe you have some kind of change in the way you’re looking at that situation. Say, one day you gaze out at the neighborhood water. See that fin popping up, that old familiar shark come swimming around. Just, you know, let me know. I have something to give him. Something he needs very badly.”

  “Yeah? What, a sea lion?”

  Flowers fixed his sleepy eyes on Archy, laid them on like hands. Slowly, skeptically, the heavy lids lifted. “I am serious, now,” he said. “You run across him or one of his known associates and running buddies. Somebody from his old crew that ain’t died yet, few in number as they are. Just let me know. Valletta Moore, for example. I heard she’s around.”

  He came at Archy’s soul then with the flashlight and the crowbar of his gaze. Archy offered no purchase and gave nothing back. Maybe the man already knew that Archy had seen Valletta; maybe he was only fishing. Archy could not have said why he decided to keep silent.

  “If she should happen to show up,” Flowers said, “let’s say. You just go on and call me on my personal cell. Feyd, give him the number. All right? Will you do that for me?”

  Archy said, “I’ll think about it.”

  “You do that,” Flowers said. “And maybe, you never
know, I might be the one ends up putting in a word for you with Mr. G Bad.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It’s not out of the question, by any means.”

  “ ‘Community relations,’ huh.”

  “The new Dogpile store, I have been reliably told, is going to have the most extensive, most encyclopedic, jazz section of any store in the country. Also hip-hop. R and B. Blues. Gospel. Soul. Funk. Somebody will have to run that department, Mr. Stallings.”

  Archy had a choice: Let the significance of these words sink in, or shed it at once without even giving it a try, like a dog encouraged to wear a hat. “Satan,” he said, smiling. “Get thee behind me.”

  Behind him there was only a snort from Feyd, or maybe it was Bankwell.

  “Up to you, of course. Baby on the way,” Flowers said. “Time you started making some real money. Get yourself that fat package of benefits they’re paying.”

  “He could offer me a ride in the Dogpile blimp,” Archy said. “I am not for sale.”

  “I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.”

  “Living in a dreamland,” Bankwell suggested.

  “Indeed,” said Flowers. “But the rent is coming due.”

  “Hey, yeah, no, I really want to thank you,” Archy said, getting to his feet. “You really helped me organize my thinking about Brokeland all of a sudden. I appreciate it.”

  “Did I?” Flowers’s turn to sound leery, doubting the trend of Archy’s thinking. “How so?”

  “You made me realize, we have to do the funeral at the store. Push back all the record bins, how we have them on those wheels, you know? We can fit all kinds of people in there. Just like for the dances we used to put on.” It was not easy, dressed in skanky b-ball shorts and a Captain EO sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves, but Archy dived down deep and hauled up all the dignity he could snap loose from the sea bottom of his soul. “Councilman, you made me realize, thank you, but me and Mr. Jones and Nat Jaffe and our kind of people, we already got a church of our own. You, too, seemed like at one time, up to not too long ago, a member in good standing. And that church is the church of vinyl.”

  “The church of vinyl,” Flowers said, looking half persuaded. But he shook his head and made a snuffling sound of amusement or disgust. “Well, well.”

  Archy turned and left the office without looking to the Bankwell side or to the Feyd, admiring as he passed between them the echo of his own phraseology as it lingered in his ears.

  “You see that fin in the water, now,” Flowers called after him. “You just go on and holler out.”

  Wide as the abyss and rumbling like doom, the El Camino rolled into the street of forsaken toys and came to a stop in front of the house. Shudder, cough, soft bang; then the whole afternoon suffused with an embarrassed silence. Late afternoon in late August, the sky limited only by the hills and the imminent wall of night. Palm tree, sycamore trees, soaked in shadow. Slouch-hat bungalows blazing sunshine at their crowns. Archy took it all in with the ardor of a doomed man. Not that he believed himself to be in any danger or was dying in any but the slowest and most conventional of ways. The clarity and sweetness of the evening, the light and the way it made his chest ache, were only the effects of mild panic, panic both moral and practical.

  When he got out of the car, the evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. He stood on the sidewalk in front of his house. The El Camino’s engine sighed and muttered to itself, settling. A toddler archaeologist searched the sandbox with a red shovel. Probably come up with some ancient bit of toy legend, a Steve Austin head, the head of an Oscar Goldman. Six million ways I use to run it. He would tell Gwen about Titus. After that there would be other things to say to various other people. A number of crucial decisions remained as yet unmade. At least he would have gotten to square one, if no farther.

  “Stay right there,” Gwen said, and it turned out that the instruction was meant for young Mr. Titus Joyner, installed on the bottom step of the front porch. Indeed, it might be surmised from his wife’s expression, as she came huffing toward him down the front walk of their house freighted with a big green duffel bag, that rather than stay right where he was, the preferred course for Archy would be to turn around and run for those motherfucking hills.

  “I took him to Trader Joe’s,” she said. She dropped the duffel on the ground between them, and it sounded like fifty pounds of property and possessions to Archy’s ear. “There’s canned black bean chili and frozen taquitos. Eggs and bacon and pancake mix and syrup.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Whatever you— Okay.” He bent down and picked up the duffel. Fifty pounds. No way could the things that Archy Stallings required to live free and equal and happy in this world weigh anything less than five, six hundred pounds.

  “I bought him new socks and underpants.” She shuddered. “And you had better believe that I disposed of the old ones.”

  Archy looked at Titus, head in hands, studying his Air Jordans. Archy imagined the new white socks on their plastic bopeeps, the fresh Fruit of the Looms in their crinkling package. It was when he looked at his son and pictured the underpants and socks that he first felt truly ashamed. This boy had no one in the world to ensure, to at least check from time to time, that his underwear was clean. And Archy was so low, of so little account as a man and a father, that Gwen, not even a blood relation, had been obliged to step in like Uncle Sam with a rogue state and intervene. Assume control over the situation.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey, man. Titus. Is this how you want it?”

  The boy thought it over, taking his time. No flicker of the process of thought was perceptible in his eyes. Then he shrugged.

  “Okay, then,” Archy said. He reshouldered the strap of the duffel and looked at Gwen. “Thank you.” He turned away, getting choked up, trying to cover it with a cough, coughing like his El Camino. His broken old car, his broke barbershop full of old broken records, and the broken-down two-tone double town of Brokeland: That was the inventory of his life.

  “Excuse me. Where are you going?”

  He turned back, understanding that he had failed to understand but not yet fully understanding. Gwen came down the walk, snatched the duffel bag from his shoulder, and staggered off with it to her car. The duffel bag rode shotgun as she backed her Beamer out of the driveway. She rolled down the window on the duffel bag’s side and waited while Archy, checking the neighbors’ windows, finding a face or two, loped over to the car.

  “I am going to tell you how to do it,” Gwen said, keeping a tight grip, Archy could see. “It is very simple. This is the only advice I’m ever going to give you, because there is nothing else to really say.”

  “Okay,” Archy said. Even though he saw Gwen sitting in her car, getting ready to drive away with her fifty pounds of freedom, he still did not fully understand that she was leaving him. “I’m listening.”

  “First I want to make sure you understand. You look confused. Are you confused?”

  “Yes, I am a little confused.”

  “I have a patient in labor. Amy. I am going to work her birth. And then I am going to sleep someplace else. I will not be returning. With me so far?”

  Archy nodded.

  “That child over there is your son. Titus. He just barely fits on an AeroBed in the back room. I have been told that he’s capable of speech but haven’t seen too much proof of that so far. Taquitos. Bacon.” She counted them off on her fingers. “You got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay. Now here is the advice: You have to make them do things they don’t want to do, even when you don’t really care if they do them or not,” she said. “All the rest is, you know.”

  It took Archy’s brain a couple of nanofarts longer, contemplating this Möbius twist of advice and the fine rear end of Gwen’s car as it receded, but a
t last he understood. The packages of underpants, the cans of Trader Joe’s black-bean chili. These were not reproaches thrown at him by an angry woman trying to shame him into paying attention to his child by the sacrifice she was bent on making. They were pieces of information that he was going to need.

  “I’m hungry,” said the boy when Archy turned back to the house.

  Whenever his mother and her sisters gathered to work hair and pronounce judgments in the kitchens of Archy’s childhood, they had two favorite terms of fulmination. The first thunderbolt they liked to throw, reaching back like Zeus to grab it from a bucket in the corner, was shameless. You used to hear that one a lot. It had an ambiguous shimmer. Shameless meant you suffered from a case of laziness so profound that you could not be bothered to hide your misbehavior; but it seemed to suggest also that you had nothing to hide, no need to feel any shame.

  The second word lofted by the sisters from the heights of their insurmountable outrage was scandalous. This term they collapsed, like a switchblade on its hinge, into two syllables, “scanless,” so that when he was young, Archy heard it as a grammatical cousin of the first: an absence of that was also a freedom from. Scanlessness was a magic invisibility, a moral cloaking device wielded by the shameless in order to render them proof against the all-seeing scanners employed by proper-acting people who knew how to conduct themselves, the latter group reckoned by the sisters to be few in number, roughly coextensive with themselves.

  Shameless and scanless Archy ducked into Walter Bankwell’s car, thus almost by definition up to no good. Back in the day, the vehicle in question would have been a hard-used but well-loved 1981 Datsun B210, the blue of testicular vasocongestion, its rear seat exchanged like the works of Doc Brown’s DeLorean for the flux capacitor of a pair of Alpine speakers capable of shaking loose the screws of time and space. Today, twelve-thirty P.M., at the secret bend of Thirty-seventh Street, a rendezvous chosen by Archy according to ancient habits of stealth, the vehicle in question was a sterling 1986 Omni GLH, turbocharged and nasty. Caution-yellow with black Band-Aid strips, its exhaust tuned to a baritone Gerry Mulligan growl. Lest Archy or anyone else currently inhabiting the surface of Sol III miss the homage intended by the paint job to the jumpsuit worn by former Oaklander Bruce Lee in his last, incomplete masterpiece, The Game of Death, Walter himself was attired in a vintage Adidas tracksuit, bee-yellow with a wide bee-black stripe up the side, and the requisite pair of bumblebee Onitsuka Tigers.