Telegraph Avenue (30 page)

“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.”

W
ide 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 at 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.

W
henever 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.

“Oh my goodness,” Archy said, aching with the beauty of the car as he swung his bulk into it, favoring his old running buddy with a long, slow head-to-toe of mock admiration. “Uma Thurman! Love your work.”

Walter broke off a piece of a smile and tucked it into his left cheek as if reserving it for future use. Giving off a vibe of irritation, of feeling put upon, as if he had better things to do, wilder geese to chase. He had e-mailed Archy from a Dogpile domain, destination and intentions left unstated and mysterious apart from a terse if not insulting (however accurate) allusion to Archy’s inability to decline a free meal.

“ ‘Uma Thurman.’ ” He shook his head, sorry for Archy, disappointed in him. “That ain’t even a insult.”

Archy considered. “You may be right.”

“When the mosquito bites her? And my girl Uma comes out that coma . . . ?” Walter laid two fingers against the wheel. “It’s, like, a simple two-step process. Step one, regain consciousness. Step two, tear it
up
.” He marveled. “When she chews that guy’s tongue right out his head . . .”

“Is that even possible?”

“Matter of fact,” Walter continued, ignoring the question, “I wish I
was
Uma Thurman. Then I would surely not have to be riding around the tired end of Temescal with no beret-wearing, soul-patch dee-vo-tay of Negritude, Charles Mingus–impersonating motherfucker.”

Walter put the GLH in gear, and they loped away from the curb with the engine blowing low notes.

“Ain’t like you got the way you are from people changing their minds about feeding you.”

There was merit in this reasoning that Archy could not discount. So he removed and folded on his lap the jacket of his linen suit, caramel brown, one-button, knife-narrow 1962 lapel; found the bar that let the seat roll back, all the way back; hooked his feet, shod in sugar-brown size-15 alligator ankle-zip boots, together at the ankles; adjusted the angle of his genuine Basque beret, also the color of brown sugar; and shut the fuck up. He had a feeling this mystery trip might be a sequel to his conversation yesterday with Chan Flowers, but his conscience wouldn’t let him take the idea any further than that. As they pulled out, he looked over his shoulder out the rear window to make sure Nat wasn’t standing there on the sidewalk.

Old Kung Fu, check him out. All those years scuffling and fucking up down in L.A., offering up his face to any door that cared to shut on it, trying to keep distance between himself and the uncle who loved him too strongly. Now here he was, back in Oakland, working for the fifth richest black man in America, driving this flawlessly restored piece of carflesh, blasting some Zapp or maybe it was solo Troutman on the in-dash factory cassette player, and in general, as he and Archy would have put it during their salad days,
keepin it surreal.

“So, like, seriously,” Archy said. “Where we going?”

But Walter’s only reply was to get on the 24 heading west, and before long they were on the 880 with only Hayward, San Jose, and Los Angeles between them and the bleak unrestauranted expanse of Antarctica.

“Someplace by the airport?” Archy guessed. Still one or two old-school dives there, tucked in among the union halls and standardized burger units along the renovated stretch of Hegenburger, dark subaquatic holes for labor lawyers to crawl into, bikers, baggage handlers, short-haul stews adding up their croutons in their Weight Watchers booklets. Nothing to look forward to that Archy knew about, except insofar as he lived in constant expectation of discovering or being led, even along the most unlikely and brand-blasted frontage road, to some great unknown plateful of marvels.

“Supposed to surprise you,” said Walter. Boy had that raspy voice anyway, but something seemed to catch at the back of his throat, a pill of hesitation. Archy replayed the e-mail in his mind, certain that it had included words that could be paraphrased as
I will buy you lunch
. “Case you too blind, dumb, and stupid to come along under your own recognizance.”

“It’s a restaurant, though. Right?”

“Keep that a surprise, too,” Walter said. “Just for a little bit longer.”

Archy’s imagination starting to run wild on him, picturing maybe some kind of farm-food bullshit where you had to slaughter your own pig, a deep-fried termite stand, something like that.

“Because, swear to God, if you’re trying to punk me—”

“Whoa, ease up, Turtle. I straight-up guarantee, you going be in the hands of a excellent chef. All right?”

Universal and catholic in his appetites, Archy sat back, soothed by this information, allowing the prospect of an enigmatic luncheon—maybe
al pastor
sliced from the rotisserie by some obscure genius in a taco truck—to drive from his mind worrisome thoughts of the boy who was, by some loop in life’s tangling, now his responsibility. Stone-face, built and colored so much like Luther Stallings, the sight of the boy like the touch of pincers to Archy’s heart, stinging him in the past and the present at the same time, an ache that leaped decades, skipped a generation. Or maybe one of those Korean barbecues where the lady came and dealt out a whole deck of little plates and bowls of kimchi on the table in front of you like she was going to tell your fortune in chili and pickles, let you cook your own short rib sliced thin as lunch meat over your own private grill. For a minute Archy allowed a Korean cook-fire in his mind to burn away the bitter consciousness, pressing at him all the time, of the hurt and disappointment he had caused and would no doubt go on causing, through his scanlessness and shamelessness, to the woman he loved. A waffle truck, a gleaming chrome bus that dished up chicken and waffles, where the fate of Brokeland Records, of his long and tricky friendship with Nat Jaffe, could all be drowned in a ribbon of pancake syrup, spreading across the crisp grid of an imagined waffle to impinge, with its sweet hint of smoke, on a crispy drumstick. All those problems, and the loss of Mr. Jones, the calls and arrangements Archy needed to make—so much smoke and vapor to be sucked up into exhaust fans roaring over Hunan woks, bubbling pots of
birria
, grill tops hissing with onions for a patty melt or a Joe’s Special.