Telegraph Avenue (55 page)

F
lowers had stashed them in a visitation room, under a gable of the sweeping bungalow roof. It was a minor room, cramped and out of the way, with latticed wallpaper that invited tedium. Window curtains the color of scorched ironing, a disturbance of pigeons outside. A room reserved for dead folks who were forgotten or unmourned, with the strange angles of a theater carved from the balcony of a chopped-up movie palace. In his spaghetti-western black suit, Flowers straddled a backward chair facing Luther and Valletta, who sat installed on an armless sofa side by side, like mourning parents. A closed coffin on a velvet bier held someone unknown.

“Look here,” said Flowers as Bank showed Archy into the room. “We got Thurston Howell III.”

“Luther,” Valletta said, and gave his knee a shove.

In Archy’s dream, it had felt like such a revelation to encounter again, to recall with such force, as if he had forgotten them completely, the crook of his mother’s fine Cherokee nose, the down on her forearms, the lingering hint of her childhood lisp. The dream had returned all that, the way a day at Stinson—the sourdough bite of a Negro Modelo, the rattle of a kite on the wind—could be restored to you by an old calendar page in a bottom drawer. At Motor City the other day, Archy had come in so pissed off at Titus and Julie, so unwilling to be there, wedged so deep in the pocket of his fury, that he hadn’t been able to see the real Luther, only the Luther required by his anger. Only whatever you saw when you pictured a dead mother and a father you had long since cut out of your life, for your own protection. Photographs and phantoms on the retina.

Now he remembered: The man sat low and scatter-limbed, but he could bounce up out of a chair, on his feet and ready to go, faster than anybody Archy knew, as if someone had dropped a coffee in his lap. That was still true. The cleft in his chin, how it seemed to have been incised by a pottery tool, deft and deliberate. The way he would scowl at you just long enough for it to make you uncomfortable, long enough for you to wonder whether he was kidding around or if you’d actually committed some sin, some forgotten transgression, before he finally pulled the rip cord on the Cleon Strutter smile.

But he was so wintry now, snow in his hair, frost on his eyebrows! Though the height and the breadth of him remained impressive, he had lost mass, gravity. He scowled at Archy from under the icy ledge of his eyebrows. Clear-eyed, possibly sober, but Archy had seen Luther sober before. That was no big thing. With Luther, a period of sobriety was a kind of Groundhog Day, a shadow needing sunshine to foretell interminable gray. Archy hung back by the door and waited. At last, like a fading custom, the Stallings smile revived.

“I hope you don’t mind, Chan,” Luther said, still looking at Archy, “if I asked my mediator to join us.”

Here it came: Time for Luther to put on a show. Archy’s heart sank, and he was about to say
Hold up
when it occurred to him that he had come for no other purpose than this.

“I parked my zeppelin in the clergy spot,” Archy said. He settled the yacht cap more firmly on his head, thinking it best to own the hat, to live up to it. “Hope that’s all right.”

He let his father take hold of him for the first time in a decade, maybe longer. Laundromat, motel air freshener, no shower, Valletta’s perfume. The bones of his shoulders. Luther making a sound, deep down, sounding like Cochise Jones at the foot pedals of his B-3.

“Hey, Valletta,” Archy said, getting free of Luther.

“Hello, Archy. I’m sorry you got mixed up in this.”

“You okay?”

“I’m just fine, thank you, honey.”

She looked like she had been fighting. No doubt, she had directed some energy toward putting herself together that morning, sleeveless white blouse, clementine-red skirt short enough to arrest the breath in your lungs. But she had since come apart here and there. One shirttail was untucked. Springs and coils broke the long rolling sweep of her hair. Luther had his bathrobe on, blue happi coat patterned with white cranes, gray kung fu shorts, Yip Man slippers. Bank and Feyd must have rolled him out of bed.

The nephews had taken up their accustomed foo-dog posts on either side of the door. Feyd looked correct, even daring, for a nephew, in a brown suit with an orange shirt and a dark purple tie, but the
malandro
swagger was out of the boy, standing with his head hung and his toes together, freshly scolded by Uncle Chan, Archy would have bet, for the spectacle they must have made beefing with a couple of
bokken
-wielding, vomiting fourteen-year-olds in the stairwell of a MacArthur Boulevard motel. Bank looked
abused
, his right cheek chewed up, his tie askew, radiating an air of outraged humility, as if he had been assaulted, say, by a skinny little gay kid armed with a hickory sword.

“Who’s in the box, Kung Fu?” Archy said.

Walter stayed behind his glasses, saying nothing. He picked at the zipper of his midnight-blue tracksuit, stitched with the name Ali in huge red script, slumped in a bentwood-back chair reserved around here for the worker, often one of the younger nephews, who was supposed to sit up with the body, keep it company when there was nobody around. A job that, in former days, often fell to little Walter Bankwell. Boy and a
Sports Illustrated
could feign wakefulness for hours on end.

“That is Mr. Padgett,” Flowers said. He uncrossed his legs and, reaching out a hand, got up to give Archy a straight up-and-down funeral-director special. “He was a teacher. Called home last Tuesday. He’s our two o’clock.”

“
Terrell
Padgett? From Oakland Tech? I had him for algebra.”

“Least he survived that,” Luther said.

“He was a pussy,” Walter said from behind his hand, into which the entire lower portion of his face was sunk glumly.

Flowers uncurled an index finger and jabbed it three times at Walter as if shaking out an umbrella full of rain. “Not. Another. Word.”

Walter lost himself in the false-color planet charted across the surface of his late-model kicks.

“Councilman,” Archy said. “Chan. What is all this? What are you doing?”

“I—I apologize, Archy, for how this went down. I think, if you hear me out, you’re going to acknowledge that I did not have a choice but to do it in this manner. Please, sit down.”

Flowers looked at Bankwell, Feyd. “Go on, clear out, now. Ms. Moore, my apologies. You want to go, you are free to go. Feyd, help Ms. Moore to the door.” He turned to Walter, narrowed his eyes to lizard slits. “You, too, fool.”

Valletta warned away Feyd when he came to clear her out, and set about doing what was necessary to remove herself from the room, sweeping herself up off the mourners’ couch, a cyclone gathering its skirts for a run at a trailer park. For a second or two she hung above Luther, looking down at his bald spot like she was willing it to widen, to engulf him in a hairless shine of ruin. Or maybe the poor girl loved him in some way that was even more incomprehensible to Archy than his own love for Luther, under its bell jar of years, flickering impossibly on. Maybe as she stood there, she was wishing that bald spot away, ungraying the hair, unlining the face, unburning the days. As far as Archy knew, Valletta had been in love with his father, on and off, high or straight, treasure to trash, since the Monday morning in 1973 when he first walked onto the set of
Strutter
. You had to figure thirty years of on-and-off love was some kind of heroic feat. Not even God could hold onto the love of Israel in the desert without the jewelry getting melted down, now and then, to make a calf.

“Give it to him,” she said to the bald spot.

Luther didn’t move or otherwise acknowledge her words, smiling at Flowers as if he had come of his own free will to sell him a magazine subscription or the formula for eternal salvation.

“Motherfucker,” she said, “you don’t give it to him, I’m gone. I’m serious. You won’t be able to find me with a satellite and a X-ray machine.”

Luther and Valletta had been costars in their mutual disaster for too long not to milk the beat, Valletta darting her eyes back and forth to read Luther’s the way that only actresses in close up ever did, reading his gaze like the screen of a teleprompter.

“Go, then, bitch,” Luther said, not without tenderness. “I ain’t folding on two pair.”

Valletta rocked back. Wavering in her resolve. Knowing she should make good on her threat and go, but trained by the Pavlovian bell of love to confuse contempt with affection and indifference with reserve. Then she shrugged, kissed the air between her and Archy, flashed her palm like a badge. “Bye,” she said.

Archy watched her and that swinging ass of hers as they headed for the door, pendulum going tick, tock. Waiting to see if she would look back at Luther, but she was true to her promise and gone. The three nephews trudged after her, and it turned out to be old Kung Fu who cast a backward glance—at Archy—as he stalked out, head down, hands shoved into the muff pockets of his track jacket. Backward and sidewise, filled with reproach, as if all this were Archy’s fault. Maybe resenting the fact, on a more basic and juvenile level, that Archy got to stay in the room and he did not. Embroidered across the back of the jacket in big red letters were the words
I AM THE GREATEST
.
Greatest bitch
, Archy thought, as Walter slammed the door behind him.

I
t was Archy’s fucking plan in the first place: Meet back at Brokeland after the burial, smoke a bowl, put a dent in the mess from the old man’s funeral. Spin a few records, restore some order. Say what there was to say, see where things stood: Dogpile, COCHISE, their lives. As friends, partners, bandmates, fathers. Decide to go down fighting on the burning deck of the
Brokeland
, or scuttle her and try to jump clear of all the flaming flotsam.

“He say anything about Belize?” Gwen wanted to know.

They were in her BMW on their way to pick up the boys, KMEL playing some 120-bpm thumper, girl singer, the usual combination of finger-crooking and sass homiletics. Gwen had fitted herself improbably into the space between seat and wheel like some novelty marvel, a ship in a bottle, a psalm on a grain of basmati. Still a great-looking woman, even this close to the event horizon, maximum gravidity. Hair wrapped up in a Ghanaian head scarf, sunset reds and oranges. Pistachio ice cream–colored cat’s-eye sunglasses. Those hands of hers gripping the wheel, beautiful freaks, almost as big as her husband’s but long and supple, fingernails clipped man-short but glossy as meringue.

“He didn’t say
anything
, is my point,” Nat said. “Dude never showed up. At the cemetery, he got into his car, he waved, that was the last time I saw him.”

“I wish I could say the same,” Gwen said. “I’m
still
not sure how Kai fits into it all. If I wasn’t already messing things up for Aviva, I’d say she was fired.”

“I mean, at least you know Archy didn’t fuck her.”

Gwen said, at least that.

“So, wait, you really are quitting?” Nat said, the news seeping in along with the first fizzy milligrams of panic and dismay. For years his life had balanced like the world of legend on the backs of great elephants, which stood on the back of a giant turtle; the elephants were his partnership with Archy, and Aviva’s with Gwen, and the turtle was his belief that real and ordinary friendship between black people and white people was possible, at least here, on the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California. Here along the water margin, along the borderlands, along the vague and crooked frontier of Telegraph Avenue. Now that foundational pileup of bonds and beliefs was tottering, toppling like the tower of circus elephants in
Dumbo.
Not because anybody was a racist. There was no tragic misunderstanding, rooted in centuries of slavery and injustice. No one was lobbing vile epithets, reverting to atavistic tribalisms. The differences in class and education among the four of them canceled out without regard for stereotype or cultural expectation: Aviva and Archy both had been raised by blue-collar aunts who worked hard to send them to lower-tier colleges. The white guy was the high school dropout, the black woman upper-middle-class and expensively educated. It just turned out that a tower of elephants and turtles was no way to try to hold up a world.

“You think I was playing with the poor woman, saying I was quitting when I’m not?”

“No.”

“Nat, do you seriously think I was
taunting
her?”

“No, ma’am.”

Sounding annoyed, she said: “So, okay, you went back to the store.”

He told her how he had found himself alone in the horror that was the aftermath of Mr. Jones’s wake. Bones and scattered beans, puddled sauces inter-oozing on discarded plates in Mandelbrot sets of grease and tomato. A stack of uneaten tortillas swollen and curling like the pages of a book that had fallen into the bathtub. And Cochise Jones officially and forever dead. Over everything, over life itself, that sense of encroaching shadow Nat was always left with when someone he loved had died. A dimming, the world’s bulb browned out. He remembered taking Julie to the Gardner Museum on a trip to Boston a few years earlier, seeing a rectangle of paler wallpaper against the time-aged wall where a stolen Rembrandt once hung, a portrait of the very thing that perched atop the stool where Mr. Jones used to sit: emptiness itself. Empty cans, empty bottles, empty store, empty night, Nat’s empty life lived fruitlessly and in vain.

“A Nat Jaffe alone,” Gwen summarized, “is a dangerous thing.”

“Bitch,” Nat said, trying to jaunt himself out of it. “I’m always alone.”

“Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of
Existential Drama Queen.
”

“Born alone, die alone.”

Nat keeping up his end by saying what was in his heart, leaving out only the secret central event of his proposed human time line, namely
Do a bunch of stupid shit alone, repeatedly, because you can’t control your dumb-ass self
.

“Okay, now,” Gwen said, “ease up, big guy.”