Telegraph Avenue

IV. Return to Forever

A change of state. Molecules in transition, liquid to vapor. A Chinatown dollar-store teacup flying a dragon kite of steam.

“No more sleep!” said Irene Jew. With a whoosh, the window shade abandoned its post, and sunshine surged through the breach. “Time to get up. Big day!”

Gwen opened her eyes. Dust motes drew paisleys across the dazzle: molecules in transition. And Gwen just another molecule, a big fat molecule, tumbling random through space.

“Big day,” she ironized. “Woo-hoo.”

Her world now consisted of four walls and a lone window at the back of the dojo, secreted behind a knobless door that was in turn concealed behind a life-size, full-length still photograph (slick pecs and abs, flying slippered right foot, teeth gritted in a predatory smile) of the eponym and presiding spirit of the Bruce Lee Institute of Martial Arts. Her life was a bedroll and a blue duffel, a meal in a paper bag, every day adding its sorry page to the history of the homelessness.

The thirty-sixth week was fertile ground for self-pity in the gravid female, and Gwen’s thoughts upon waking struck her as neatly diagnostic.

Master Jew cupped the teacup with its painted mountain landscape in her tiny hands, trained to mend and heal, as well as to deal blows by Lam Sai Wing, who had studied under the great doctor and righter of wrongs Wong Fei Hung. She squatted beside the sleeping mat in her black cotton pants and shapeless white tunic, waiting out her latest hidden guest and source of irritation until, at last, said individual hoisted herself halfway out of the bedroll. Gwen took the cup into the outsize hands that had cupped the tender skulls of a thousand babies and whose lineage of instruction likewise could be traced directly back to the nineteenth century, to a midwife named Juneteenth Jackson, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Gwen’s twice-great-grandmother.

“Hot tap water,” Gwen said. She made a face. Her tone damned not only the idea of drinking hot tap water but all the eventualities that had led her to another lonely reveille in this glorified closet, its sole ornament a Chinese dollar-store Ming vase in which stood a plastic red Gerber daisy that was really a ballpoint pen. To this cut-rate futon with its smell like stale waffles. To this moment at which a cup of hot tap water must—she would not have dared to refuse Master Jew—be drunk. “What I need is a cup of coffee.”

“Coffee make your baby restless,” Master Jew said. “Make him want to run away from home one day.”

Along with the cup of hot water, then, Gwen must evidently accept an implicit criticism of her own flight from home and hearth. A ninety-year-old Chinese master of kung fu, even a female one, was not likely to be all that progressive, you had to figure, when it came to the question of proper relations between husband and wife.

Gwen drank and was amazed, as always, by how good hot tap water actually felt and tasted, how well it suited your throat and gullet going down, how drinking it seemed to loosen some inner string or melt an inner coldness you did not even know that you harbored. Master Jew claimed to be able to cure all kinds of ailments with nothing but a mugwort cigar and the regular consumption of moderately hot water. In the darkness of Gwen’s belly, the son or daughter of her worthless husband gave a flutter kick of gratitude for the drink.

“How’s your back?” said Master Jew.

Gwen reached the fingers of one hand to palpate the muscles at the small of her back. In the past few days, her pregnancy had been finding new, painful uses for the largest knots of muscle on her frame. She woke in the company of charley horses, grandma cramps, stiffness of the joints. She shrugged. “It hurts.”

Master Jew knelt and reached behind Gwen to plunge her fingers into the root system of the lumbar like a gardener with a crocus to transplant. Gwen drew in a sharp breath at the pain, yet the abrupt rough contact of the old woman’s cool, dry, soft-skinned fingers came as a shock to her exiled heart. Gwen loved Master Jew the way one was supposed to love one’s kung fu master: furiously, like a child.

“Better,” Master Jew said.

“A little,” Gwen admitted.

Here was the reason that Gwen had been drawn into and persevered with her studies at the Bruce Lee Institute for so long, training hard for nearly four years until she had earned her black belt: because qigong, like Master Jew, didn’t seem to care if you believed in it or not.

She passed the empty cup back to the old woman, who acknowledged without gesture or word the look of gratitude in Gwen’s eyes. Master Jew also noted a thickening of the young woman’s pretty features, a blurring of her wide gaze. Overnight Gwen appeared to have moved into the climax of her term. The baby was going to arrive so soon, and here was this woman with her life in disorder. Working too hard. Taking care of other mothers-to-be while neglecting her own health. To make matters worse, she had spent the past three nights sleeping in this tiny room, in a hip-pocket world that crackled with male energies. Master Jew hawked up a pill of phlegm and spat it with feline delicacy into a linen handkerchief.

No, it would not do.

When Gwen had shown up for class on Monday night, with a packed duffel bag in the back of her BMW convertible and traces of tears on her cheeks, long-ingrained instincts had caused Master Jew to reach out and catch the falling young woman. But now the teacher saw that she had not handled the matter properly. Irene Jew was a very old woman—she liked to boast, improbably, that she was the oldest Chinese woman west of the Rocky Mountains—and over the long years of wandering and exile, from Guangdong to Hong Kong to Los Angeles to Oakland, she had presented countless students with the black sash that was the mark of longest study and hardest training, pain, devotion, tedium, and work. Some of these students had been capable of magnificence and others of brilliance, and a few had partaken of both qualities. Until now, however, none of them had ever been a pregnant black woman who drove a BMW. Master Jew never quite knew how to behave toward Gwen Shanks.

“This place very bad for you,” she said. “Bad smell. Also bad to look at. Ugly.”

“Yes.” Gwen made a sound, a hoarse intake of breath that might have been the precursor to tears or one of her big sputtering guffaws. She massaged her face, took her hands away, opened her eyes. “I mean, no, it’s all right, but. I’m sorry.” She reached for the bed jacket in a metallic shade of good brown silk that lay folded by the futon and pulled it around her. She wore silk pajamas that matched the robe, piped with white. “I just need a good night’s sleep.”

Her duffel lay open, all the clothes and shoes and bottles of lotion encased in Ziploc bags. It was time to get up and get dressed for her big day; at three P.M. she and Aviva were due to go before a board charged with reviewing the status of their privileges. Gwen looked at the clothes she had stuffed into her bag three nights ago, the distended stretch tops and yoga pants, the preposterous bras and geriatric panties. “Just one good night of sleep.”

“Need your pillow.”

“I do,” Gwen said, yearning for the long, cool expanse of the Garnet Hill body pillow that for months, interwoven with her legs, arms, and belly, had been her truest lover. “I do need my pillow, so bad.”

“Go home,” Master Jew said. “Get it.”

“I can’t.”

Master Jew turned her back to Gwen. Across the scarred and glossy bamboo floor of the studio, four high windows looked out onto the blue glazing of a summer Oakland sky crazed with telephone wires. Behind the concrete hulk of the old Golden State market, a palm tree hiked its green slattern skirts.

“Okay, I know you need me out of here. I’m so grateful you let me stay this long. After today I’ll go to a hotel, I’ll rent an apartment. One of those little places down in Emeryville by the movie theater. IKEA’s right there. Get a crib, some dishes. Whatever I’m going to need. I know I’ve been kind of lying around here moping and feeling sorry for myself. My back hurts, and I’ve been maybe in a little bit of shock. There are a lot of things I don’t know. If I can take care of a baby on my own. If I’m going to be able to keep doing the work I have been doing for the past ten years.”

Master Jew kept her back to Gwen, who knew that her speech had been disrespectful and poorly judged in both its length and its tone.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen concluded. “Seriously. Tomorrow, next day at the latest, I’m out of here.”

The teacup—smaller than the first, red and gold with an intricate carpet pattern and a goldfish—was in Gwen’s face before she realized that Master Jew had moved, a sudden accident of vision like a blackout or a camera flash, and by the time she realized that the crazy old lady had actually tossed a teacup at her head, Gwen’s right palm was smarting, and the intercepted cup lay cool against her fingers, where, at the base of her thumb, it gave up one last drop.

“Big day. Get dressed,” Mrs. Jew said. “Then go get your pillow.”

Gwen felt nervous about her footing, her status under her own roof. So she had in mind a kind of marital Grenada, the deployment of massive force in support of a modest, even risible objective. But when she drove past the sleeping house at 6:51 A.M. (an hour with which her husband had never been intimately acquainted), it looked so ordinary, blue-painted cedar shakes peeling, honeysuckle strangling the slat fence, empty tanks from the Arrowhead bubbler ranged along the front porch, that she lost her stomach for a fight. She rolled right past the house and, for an instant, considered driving on.

True enough, as she had told Master Jew, the body pillow did not just preserve her sleep: there were nights when she felt it was the only thing in this world that felt and understood her. True to its name, the body pillow had come to embody the unknown child inside her, mute and shapeless but imbued with some distinct essence or presence of the baby to come. The body pillow was a doll that she nightly cuddled as, in weird pregnancy dreams, the baby was transformed into all manner of beasts and vegetables and stuff a whole lot freakier than a pillow. At the same time, she knew, it was only a forty-five-dollar body pillow she had bought online. It could easily be replaced.

“The hell with that,” she said aloud, and parked the car in front of the Lahidjis’ house. “I want my damn pillow.”

She did not get out of the car. She did some qi breathing. She groped for the shimmery little bead at the center of herself. She tried to harness or at least to tidy up her qi. She had enough conflict to deal with today, she reminded herself, without adding to the toll of stress, measurable in rads, to which she and the baby had been exposed. Still, her sense of outrage over all that Archy had done and failed to do as a husband, a father, and a man remained undiminished by her reluctance to confront him, and that outrage fixated on, swarmed like a cloud of bees around, the sum of forty-five dollars. She was not going to throw that money away. She had left behind many things of value in the house when she left Archy, and if she never got back any of those things, so be it; let the body pillow serve to redeem the remainder of the life and possessions she had abandoned. She got out of the car. Only one course open to her: to come in not like a battalion of marines overwhelming some little isle of coconuts but like Special Forces: surgical. Stealthy. In and out.

Gwen decided to try the back door first. She slipped—without much clearance on either side of her—along the broken snake hide of the brick walk that ran between the house and a hurricane fence, the fence woven with morning glory like some kind of feral basket. She sneaked past the kitchen windows, past the garbage and recycling bins, through that whole shadowy side zone of the house, which she had entered rarely over the years, a dense and leaf-shadowed passage hospitable, or so she always imagined, to rats. That thought hurried her along.

The backyard looked worse than she remembered. Brick barbecue area, angel’s trumpet tree hung with yellow wizard hats, chain-link fence obliterated from view in many places by green flows of ivy and jasmine and morning glory. Shaggy stand of pampas grass. The forlorn expanse of concrete that some previous occupant of the house, through an excess of laziness or optimism, had painted lawn-green. It was a mangy, scraggly, jungly mess that must be lowering property values as far away as Claremont Avenue. It was an embarrassment. But Gwen had been gone only a week; this ruin was the work of years. A faithful record of her untended life.

She averted her gaze from the broken latticework around the foundation of the house, the loose weather stripping that peeped like a gang banger’s drawers from the seams around the back door. When she and Archy bought the house, it had been a semi-wreck, cheap but ill used. They had prepared a list of the repairs and improvements they were going to make. This list was divided among the required, the optional, and the fantastic. They put in new toilets and sinks, using a book from the library. They redid the floors, rehung the windows, patched the roof. It was the first common project of their marriage, and looking back on that time, Gwen felt a twinge of loss and regret for their happiness. In time they had crossed off all the things that were required, but when they reached the next phase, they opted against the optional. At some point well before they arrived at the fantastic, they had lost track of the list.

Gwen unlocked the back door and pushed, but the door pushed back. The chain was set. It was a formidable chain installed by the previous owner, and to Gwen’s knowledge, neither she nor Archy had ever employed it. There was something unnerving about the vigor with which the chain resisted letting Gwen enter the house. It was as though Archy had changed the locks on her. Gwen was insulted. She was about to start pounding, demanding an explanation, but she remembered her maternal resolve to stay calm. It occurred to her that Archy might feel less secure without her in the house, and the thought touched her. She shut the back door with a soft click and crept back around to the front door.

As she let herself in, she realized that a faint rolling hum she had taken, coming up the porch steps, for the vibration through the old fir floor of the refrigerator, or maybe the humidifier in the basement, maybe even some kind of distant cement mixer or the MedEvac helicopter landing on its pad over at Children’s Hospital, was in fact the entwined snoring of two boys. Julie Jaffe lay half extruded from Gwen’s old sleeping bag, shirtless and shockingly pale, with little pink guinea-pig nipples. Titus had been neatly interred beneath Archy’s Diff’rent Strokes sleeping bag, only his weird fingery toes and the upper half of his face visible. A glacier of DVD cases slid across the coffee table, Strutter, Ghetto Hitman, Soul Shaker, all those crazy crap-ass movies that Archy’s father had spent the seventies cranking out or being cranked out by. Peeking from under a Styrofoam clamshell from which a couple of french fries poked like the feelers of a large and cautious insect was another disc on whose label she recognized the astonishing Afro of Valletta Moore, along with the barrel and silencer of the .357 she fondled, in that iconic pose from the poster of Nefertiti, forty stories of endless brown leg with a pair of highjacked fuck-me pumps for a ground floor, yellow satin hot-pants jumpsuit for a pediment. The room hung heavy with a fug of puberty, microwave popcorn, and something unidentifiable but horrible.

Julie, in his nocturnal wrestling with her sleeping bag, had crawled so far that she nearly stepped on him when she came into the room. The hollow of his hairless chest, the puzzled knot of his brows, the soft straight hair pasted by night sweat across his bony forehead, all stirred deep memories of the nights when she used to watch him for Aviva and Nat, sing him her grandmother’s grave lullabies. His innocence then struck her, as she recalled it now, as having also been her own: before Nat and Aviva fixed her up with Archy, before the long, gathering disappointment of her professional life.

She preferred not to look at Titus, snoring away under a goofy and tragic mantle blazoned with an image of Gary Coleman and Todd Bridges in matching sweaters. She felt sorry for him, but she did not want to feel sorry for him, and so she let him piss her off. Meanwhile, the mystery smell, it became clear to her pregnant nose, plain as the pall of carnage, was the smell of old hamburger. She made the mistake of looking more closely at the clamshell package on the table. A pink and beaded gray streak of fat dribbled like candle wax down the outside of it and sent a rocket of hot bile arcing from her belly to her mouth.

She would have been willing to bet forty-five dollars that ninjas and Green Berets did not, generally speaking, incorporate vomiting into their operational procedures. The humiliation of that would be too much to bear; Archy had spent, without complaint, a fair amount of time in the early days of her pregnancy handling her various ejecta.

The molecules of oxidized fat seemed to trail her like malodorous pixies as Gwen crept down the hall to the bedroom and opened the bedroom door. The blinds were drawn, but in the window behind Archy’s auntie’s old Marie Antoinette−style dresser, the job had been poorly done, so that they hung at an angle to the windowsill. In the daylight seeping under this hypotenuse, Gwen could see Archy heaped up on the bed, flat on his back. It was a round bed that Archy had brought to the marriage—he called it his secret-agent bed—and with his legs and arms spread in four directions, he reminded her of the naked man by Leonardo da Vinci, squaring the circle or whatever it was. Only Archy was not naked; he had on a pair of Cal basketball shorts. Her objective lay right alongside him, bent double, ignored or perhaps trying to wriggle away. All the other, more conventional pillows had been kicked or flung over the side of the bed and lay in dejected attitudes on the floor. Typically, Archy slept flat on the mattress and employed a pillow only to cover his face when a room was too full of light. He was not going to miss the body pillow at all.

The molecules drifting downwind from the burger-joint packaging in the living room seemed at last to abandon their pursuit of Gwen. She could stand to breathe through her nose again, and what she smelled was her bedroom, her husband, her life. The clove-and-citrus redolence of his aftershave, a Christmasy smell. A smell she had fallen in love with early on. Now it struck her as a tonic, bracing and restorative, steeling her to reach for the pillow, careful, moving slow, holding her breath. She grabbed two feather-fill fistfuls of pillow and began to peel it away from the mattress one patient millimeter at a time.

Archy rolled over onto his side and, with a sharp intake of breath, threw his legs around the body pillow. He pressed his hips against it, took it in his arms, drew it close to him. He embraced it, let his breath out shuddering, sighed once, and began to snore. Gwen froze, horrified, thrilled, and pricked by a sense of betrayal, though whether by her husband or the body pillow, she would not have been able to say.

“Don’t get up yet,” Archy said without opening his eyes. Begging in his sleep. He took another long appreciative sip of unconsciousness, weighing the flavor of it in his mouth, smacking his lips. “Don’t leave me.”

Gwen considered a number of possible rejoinders to this, among them “Too late, motherfucker,” “I’m sorry,” “I won’t, ever again,” and “You are talking to a pillow.”

She let go of the forty-five-dollar pillow without saying a word. She turned and slipped back out of the bedroom. As she looked up from easing the door shut and releasing the doorknob with practiced soundlessness, she saw Titus standing at the other end of the hall, watching her, not quite smirking, not quite looking confused. Those blue-green Luther Stallings eyes, rimed with the unreadable force-field shimmer that veiled the light eyes of black folks.

“I just came to get my special pillow,” Gwen said in a pathetic whisper.

Titus nodded, then seemed to notice that she was not carrying anything.

“I changed my mind,” Gwen said.

She felt a pulse of tightening across her belly that she knew meant dehydration. The boy got out of her way as she moved past him into the kitchen. Standing behind her, he became the only thing that prevented her from backing away in horror at what she discovered there.

“Oh my God,” she said.

The boy concurred with a mirthless snort.

“What did you do?”

“He said you could grind coffee in the blender.”

“Who did?”

“Julie.”

“Did he also say you could shoot Ragu out of a SuperSoaker? Because that’s what it looks like happened in here.”

The boy shrugged.

She soldiered in, holding her breath as if walking into a recently vacated portable toilet, and ran herself a glass of water from the sink. “Now I see why you put the chain on the back door.” She drained off the whole twelve ounces in one greedy draft. “It was for the protection of others.”

“That was Julie, too,” Titus said. “He gets scared.” Again there was not quite a smirk on his face; his expression held too much curiosity for that.

“I know he does,” Gwen said.

Something, some routine tenderness in her tone or aspect of her he had not considered, made him train his curiosity apparatus on her. He measured her circumference and girth. “You got a special pillow for that,” he said, pointing at her abdomen.

“A body pillow.”

“To hold it up when you’re sleeping?”

“I don’t really sleep,” Gwen said. “But especially not without.”

“So, and, that kid in there. That’s, like, my brother.”

Gwen thought about rinsing the lipstick from the rim of the water glass, but in the unlikely event that anyone noticed it among the marinara Pollocks and the termite mounds of plates and pans, the print of her lipstick could serve as a calling card, a silver bullet, a bent joker.

“Or sister,” she said.

“You didn’t have no ultrasound?”

“Any. We asked them not to tell us.”

“You want the surprise.”

“Archy does. I don’t like surprises.” It came out sounding more pointed than she had intended, but not inappropriately so.

“Why don’t you just find out and not tell him?”

“I could do that,” she said.

“What. Aw, you already did,” Titus guessed. “Am I right?”

Gwen took the chain off the back door. “Half brother,” she told Titus before she went out into the rest of her day. “And half I don’t know what.”

“Who was that?” man wanted to know.

Nothing but questions ever rising from that quarter, man shaking them up in the cup of his fist like a handful of dice every time he walked into a room that was furnished with his son. You like Rice Krispies? English muffins? Baseball? Star Wars? Peaches? The ladies? Mos Def? Cats? Dogs? Mentos? Monkeys? Nobody ever taught you to brush your teeth when you wake up in the morning? Did that shirt used to be white? How you spend so much time playing that damn game? What would happen if you read an actual Marvel motherfucking comic book one time? You ever hear of washing a dish? Listen to Duke Ellington? Do you know who Billy Strayhorn was? Aw, shit, are you trying to break my heart? Letting fly the dice. In that regard, the man offered little in the way of novelty; Titus felt himself to be a vortex around which the questions of adults routinely came to circle, like that wheel of plastic he had seen one night on the Discovery Channel, out there past Hawaii someplace, great big endless turning of plastic bags and pop bottles. Every conversation a quiz, a debriefing, an interrogation, a catechism. Every sentence fitted at the end with its whiplash curl, a hook to snare him. And every single one of those questions, at bottom, nothing but rhetorical, admitting of and needing no reply.

“Who was who?” Titus said.

Take it in, feed it right on back at them.

“You were talking to somebody, sounded like a woman. Was it Gwen?”

“Who’s Gwen?”

“Boy, you know who Gwen is. My wife.”

Titus produced an elaborate shrug, three-part, multilayered like a Vulcan chessboard. “I guess.”

“You guess.”

“She was here.”

At this news, his father got hollow-eyed, his big old Yogi Bear cheeks going all slack. Standing there by the bedroom door where his wife had stood a few minutes ago. Tying and retying an unsuccessful bow in the sash of his playboy bathrobe. Man took in the socks littering the hallway floor, the stink of male habitation in the house. He closed his eyes, working on must be like two, three hours of sleep, eye sockets purple with fatigue. No doubt picturing the devastation in the kitchen, the trash heaps in the living room, the skinny little underpantsed white boy tangled up out there in that crusty old sleeping bag. Reconstructing in his mind the likely path of her visit. Understanding how disgusted she had been by it all. Running through the whole scenario like the flashback at the end of a detective film that shows the murder as it must have gone down, everybody sitting around the parlor or the conservatory or whatever, under the framed butterflies and the stuffed tiger heads, while the detective laid it all out. She was standing right there; you needed only to wake up and you would have seen her. But you did not wake up, did you, Mr. Stallings? He dragged one hand across his face slowly and with intent, like he was hoping to erase its features. He opened his eyes.

“Fuck me,” he said. “Look at this shit.”

He kicked on down the hallway, trailing that lemon Pledge smell he had, almost but not quite brushing against Titus as he went by. When he came into the living room, what he discovered there seemed not only to confirm but to deepen or dwarf his worst fears.

“What she want to be coming here today,” he said, his voice barely loud enough to hear. For once it did not sound like a question.

So Titus didn’t answer. Not—this time—because he made it a point of pride to spurn or duck his father’s and all the pointless questions of the adult world, but because what was he going to say? Mention had been made of a body pillow, but Titus understood that a body pillow explained nothing, was only what Hitchcock called a MacGuffin. The swell of the woman, the arc of the brother who deformed her, the serious way she had of speaking to Titus, looking at him not boy-you-best-get-yourself-together serious, like Julie’s mom, but scientist serious, skeptical, fascinated by what she saw. How was he going to put any of that into words?

His father said, “Jaffe, get up.”

Julie sat up at once, pink nipples like a pit bull pup’s, not a hair on him anywhere except for, under his left arm, if you knew about it, one coarse wire like an eyebrow whisker, about which it was not unknown for Titus to tease him. Julie blinked, focusing on the man, cross-eyed and hungover on the vapors of his last dream of the night.

“Gwen was here,” the man told him.

Julie nodded, then saw that something more was wanted. He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he tried.

“Not asking you. Titus says Gwen was here. Just now.” He turned to Titus. “In this room?” Titus nodded again. “In the kitchen?”

“Had a drink of water from the sink.”

“Sweet Jesus,” Archy said. He looked back at Julie. “So you didn’t see her, then?”

“I was asleep,” Julie said.

“Yeah, I was asleep, too. Only one wasn’t asleep was my boy Titus, here, and as usual, he don’t have too much to say on the subject.”

Titus got that a criticism was intended by this last remark, although he did not consider it to be so. You could damn yourself with silence but never so effectively as by running your mouth. He hung back as his father approached the disordered and, at best, to be honest (owing to the poor quality of the original film stock, subpar camerawork, third-rate video transfers, routine yet crazy story lines, and wooden dialogue), broken evidence of Luther Stallings’s having, at one time, shone forth from the screens of ghetto grindhouses. At first the man seemed not to notice the DVDs, preoccupied instead by the crumpled napkins, the twenty-four-ounce cups, the greasy packages of leftover food. With the hopeless energy of someone trying to save worthless knickknacks from an impending wildfire, he gathered up the cheese-edged clamshell packages, the used forks and straw wrappers, and all the other refuse the boys had left out last night when, at three-thirty A.M., man still not home from a gig in the city, they finally switched off the television and went to sleep. Stacked it all precariously in his arms as if there were a chance that the wife might return any second.

“Fuck me,” he said again. He stomped into the kitchen, growling once when he comprehended the full disastrousness thereof. Banged around under the sink until he found a garbage bag, tumbled into it all the garbage he was holding. Folding anger up into himself like a hurricane gathering seawater, he swept through the kitchen picking up trash. Came stomping back into the living room, fat ghetto Santa with the soul patch, slinging his Hefty sack.

“I cannot believe you little motherfuckers left my damn house looking like this,” he said, accurately but without justice, since in so leaving it, they had only been following the principles of housekeeping as laid down after his wife’s departure by the man himself. The dire state of the kitchen was as much his fault as anyone’s. “Can’t believe she came this morning.” As if, say, she came yesterday or tomorrow, whole place would have been done up shiny and correct, and today was some freak of the housekeeping schedule. “House looking like a garage full of crackheads. She should of— Wait. Hold up.”

Now the cover of Night Man, one of the DVDs that Titus and Julie had rented from Videots on College Avenue last night, seemed to catch the man’s eye, to register for the first time. He picked up the case, turned it over, read the hype, scholarship, and bullshit written there.

“‘Quentin Tarantino Presents,’” he said. “Huh.”

As he made a study of the DVD box, his stance widened, his posture grew straighter. The anger making landfall, moving inland. Feeding on itself, was Titus’s impression—and he was schooled in the repertoires of anger. Rifling through the other DVD cases scattered up and down the table. Tarantino was right: Night Man was the best thing in the Stallings filmography, a straight bank heist, cops and robbers, light on the cheese, scored by Charles Stepney, shot by Richard Kline, who shot Soylent Green and some other cool movies of the day, one of the Planet of the Apes movies. Cheap, rough, and uneven, it made plain and proclaimed for all time the truth of Luther Stallings’s physical grace in 1975, the beauty of his winged nostrils, the lowdown way he smiled, the fatal architecture of his hands.

Man said, “What is this shit?”

Titus was about to say “It’s your father” but, at the last instant, realized it might sound like he was saying that Luther Stallings, his grandfather, was shit. When, to the contrary, Luther Stallings at one time had stood in full possession of a definite article, not to mention two capital letters. Was most definitely The Shit.

Before this summer, before last week, the name of Luther Stallings was not a memory to Titus but the memory of someone else’s memory, like a minor hit or the vice president of the disco years. A scatter of images caught like butterflies in the grille of his mind. First: an article in an old, a very old, a King Tut–old copy of Ebony tucked into a drawer in his grandmother’s nightstand. Titus remembered little about the article apart from the name of its subject, the title Strutter, and a shot of Luther Stallings sitting in a Los Angeles living room, in tight black pants and white ankle boots, tossing a baseball to a blur of a boy. Second: a scratchy, washed-out clip in a Wu-Tang Clan video, no more than a few seconds long, showing a lean light black man causing grievous harm with his fists and feet to a gang of homicidal Taoists. Third and faintest: the memory, really the acrid residue—and no more—of the low opinion, bottled like smoke in the name Stallings, held by his granny for all the fathers to whom Titus was heir.

None of these echoes prepared Titus for the truth of the greatness of Luther Stallings as revealed in patches by the movies themselves, even the movies that sucked ass. None readied him for the strange warmth that rained down onto his heart as he sat on the couch last night with the best and only friend he’d ever had, watching that balletic assassin in Night Man, with those righteous cars and that ridiculous bounty of fine women, a girl with a silver Afro. Luther Stallings, the idea of Luther Stallings, felt to Titus like no one and no place had ever felt: a point of origin. A legendary birthplace, lost in the mists of Shaolin or the far-off technojungles of Wakanda. There in the dark beside Julie, watching his grandfather, Titus got a sense of his own life’s foundation in the time of myth and heroes. For the first time since coming to consciousness of himself, small and disregarded as a penny in a corner of the world’s bottom drawer, Titus Joyner saw in his own story a shine of value, and in himself the components of glamour.

Man said, “You all having a Luther Stallings film festival?”

“He was good,” said Julie.

“No, Julie, he was not.”

“Well, at kung fu or whatever.”

The man did not look up from the plastic case. He spoke with a soft and furious enunciation. “I don’t want this motherfucker in my house,” he said. “Not in any form. Not flesh and blood. Not in electrons, pixels. Not even the damn name out your damn mouth. Okay? Got that?”

The man scooped up the rented elements of their Stallings film festival, stacked them haphazardly, and tried to hand them off to Titus. Titus just looked at them. The man shoved them at Julie instead.

“Get them out of my house!” he said.

“Okay, okay,” Julie said. “Jeez, Archy, what the hell?”

Boy stunned by the abruptness, the violence, of how he found himself in possession of the DVDs. Looking at the man like he was about to cry. “I’m sorry, Archy. I didn’t—”

“That’s your daddy,” Titus heard himself say, to his surprise if not horror. “Man was a motherfucking movie star! You should be feeling proud of him.”

“Huh.”

“He was good,” Titus said. “He could really act. Better than Fred Williamson, and fight better, too. Better fighter than Jim Kelly, who wasn’t no kind of actor. Better than all them white guys, Chuck Norris, dude with the eyebrows—”

“John Saxon,” Julie said.

“John Saxon. Better than most of them classic Chinese dudes, too. Sonny Chiba, Sammo Hong. You know you love that type of shit, got that screen capture from The Game of Death for a desktop. Fighting that big dude, looks like some kind of giant emu. It don’t even make sense for you to not appreciate Luther Stallings. He can play piano. He’s like a expert at barbecue and shit.” These facts he’d cribbed from a bonus feature on the Night Man disc. “But, I mean, even if you don’t like him, you got to still respect him.”

Titus saw that he had afforded the man a fresh surprise on this unusual morning.

“Two weeks you don’t say ten words,” the man said. “Now you going to make me a whole speech, huh? Telling me what I’m supposed to feel.”

“It’s your father.”

“Uh-huh. So then, by that logic, I guess you must respect me?”

“Nah,” Titus said. “Because you just a sperm donor.”

It left his bow with a snap of inspiration and hit its target with a thwack you could almost hear. It rocked the man back before he rallied.

“Okay, first of all,” he said, “that shit was not ‘donated,’ okay, it was bestowed. Second, that ‘emu’ is Kareem Abdul motherfucking Jabbar. Third, all right, and listen to me now, I got enough shit to worry about, all right, laying my actual father figure to rest day after tomorrow, providing food and drinks for like a hundred people. Rounding up a marching band. Tracking down a parrot. In my garage, okay, I have the Hammond organ that killed Cochise Jones just, like, sitting there, need to be patched up so we can give the man a fitting tribute. I got all this personal shit piling up everywhere, baby coming, wife going out of her motherfucking mind. Got like three hours sleep. Got this skinny little motherfucker here, wandering around in his underpants, wearing a sleeping bag around one ankle like it’s some kind of fucked-up giant sock. You two little faggots,” yanking out the last couple of Jenga blocks from the tottering pile of his cool, “you come in here, dropping DVDs all over the place, disrespecting me, disrespecting my wishes, messing up my gotdamn house—”

Julie looked up accusingly. Disappointed in the man, wanting him to know it. “Hate speech,” he pointed out.

“Think so?” the man said. “Because, brother, that is fucking mild compared to what you about to hear. You little fuckers can put your clothes on, pack your bags, and get the fuck out, both of you. Leave the premises. And take those piece-of-shit movies with you. I am bouncing your cinephile asses.”

“Seriously?” Julie said.

Man seemed right then to want to show Julie that he was in earnest. He picked up the copy of Strutter in its box, Luther Stallings’s first film, made when he was only eight years older than Titus was today. Threw it on the ground, stomped it four times.

“Get. The. Fuck. Out.”

The plastic gave way twice, but on the third blow, the case snapped in half. The last time the disc broke. Three shining pieces of rainbow lying on the rug.

“Asshole,” Titus said.

Murderous, hopeful, he took a swing at his father. Twisted stylishly back around on himself, lost his footing, fell. The hand that broke his fall got caught up in the pieces of the shattered case. A piece of broken rainbow cut him, enough to bleed a little, hurt a lot.

“I fucking hate you,” Titus said, his voice sounding, even to his own ears, dismayingly girlish and shrill. “I hate you so motherfucking much!”

Man stood over him, looking down, hands on his hips, breathing in big wheezy lungfuls of the air they all had soured.

“Now, that,” he said, “is what I call hate speech.”

Two blocks from Brokeland, backing into a space on Apgar Street with a furious swipe of the El Camino’s steering wheel, sucking the last charred millimeter of usefulness from a fatty while trying to confirm an order for twenty pounds of al pastor, twelve dozen tortillas, and a gallon of pico de gallo from the Sinaloa taco truck down on East Fourteenth, Archy Stallings tripped some inner wire tied to hidden charges of remorse. Remorse for his unmanly and irresponsible outburst with the boys, for the hurt done to Gwen, for Gwen’s unveiling of the unanimous squalor into which her leaving had sunk him. Remorse, at last, for his Ethiopian adventure—Archy recalling, with the remorseful acuity of marijuana, the ink of melancholy that flooded the pupils of Elsabet Getachew whenever she looked up at him with his jimmy in her mouth. Regret for his general inability to holster said jimmy, for his last quarrel with Mr. Jones, for his choice of brown wing tips with a suit that had more blue in its glen plaid than he remembered. He cut the engine and sat, a hi-hat of regret, struck hard and resounding.

Just before the taco lady returned from running his deposit to take Archy off hold and inform him, employing a deft and broken phraseology, that the operation was a failure and his Visa card had not survived the procedure, Clifford Brown, Jr., came on KCSM to back-announce a cut he must have played before Archy got in the car, Freddie Hubbard’s 1970 cover of “Better Git It in Your Soul,” “featuring,” as Junior put it, “on the organ, Oakland’s late, great Mr. Cochise Jones,” and Archy found himself unexpectedly on the verge of tears. That verge was as close to tears as Archy usually allowed himself to come. Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.

It was just something in the way Clifford Brown, Jr., said, Late, great.

“I knew my card was hurting,” Archy conceded to the taco lady, weeping freely. “I did not know it was that sick.”

“Is okay,” the taco lady said, mistaking the wobble in his voice for simple grief over the loss of Mr. Jones, almost as loyal a customer of Sinaloa as he had been of Brokeland Records, prone to fall into an almost musical rapture at the spectacle of all those rotating slabs of glazed and crispy pork stacked on a spindle like tasty 45s. Or maybe she was making no mistake at all. “You pay me cash when you pick it up, okay? Day after tomorrow, eleven A.M.? Okay?”

Archy said that would be okay. He worked to get a grip on himself. Thinking of Tony Stark, Iron Man, with that shrapnel lodged in his heart’s scar tissue, doomed to a life encased in armor, flashing his repulsor rays. That Gwen’s departure may have stirred echoes of the death of Archy’s mother’s—FOOM! Repulsed. That if you went back in time and informed Archy Stallings, at the age of fourteen, one day his own son would be filled with nothing but reproach and contempt for the worthless man who had, Wile E. Coyote–style, left a hole in his life in the precise shape of a fleeing father—FOOM! Repulse the motherfucker.

“Day after tomorrow,” Archy said, wiping his cheek with the overly blue sleeve of his suit jacket.

Then Nat Jaffe beeped in on the other line.

“I’m a block away,” Archy told Nat.

It was forty-seven minutes past the hour of eleven, only about twelve minutes beyond the usual frontiers of Archy’s lateness, and he wished sincerely but without much hope that his partner was not planning on pitching him shit about it. Not this morning.

“You have a visitor,” Nat informed him, sounding cool if not frosty.

Dread took hold of Archy, mostly at the scalp, like the lining of a too-small hat. The number of available candidates for the role of Dreadful Visitor was more than sufficient to stock his premonition of doom, but at the core of the feeling sat the memory of a visit paid to his third- grade classroom by the school principal, during current events, on the Tuesday morning of his mother’s passing. After that day every visitor was, in prospect, Mr. Ashenbach, all news going to be bad. Enemies, lovers, hitherto unknown children, cops and federales, process servers, debtors and creditors, vengeful Ethiopian fathers or brothers or clan elders, any one of the nine thousand and nine fools he had been plagued or influenced by over the years, folks time-traveling forward from any one of a number of doubtful periods of his life. Bankwell, Feyd, Titus, or Gwen. In the end he settled on his father as the likeliest Mr. Ashenbach du jour.

“Man by the name of Goode,” Nat said, the temperature of his tone dropping by another ten degrees Kelvin. “Says he’s a particular friend of yours. Came with his entourage.”

Turned out to be only Walter, skulking around in a five-hundred-dollar tracksuit behind that small moon. That’s no moon, it’s Taku, an earbud in his left ear, another dangling like a locket down his chest. A heavy burden of loot at throat, ear, and wrist, black tee, blue jeans, blue Top-Siders without socks.

“You fucking it up,” Walter confided to Archy in a murmur. Archy careful to have on his round tortoiseshell sunglasses, nobody going to catch Diz or Mingus crying over whatever stupid shit they might have done or left undone. “Don’t fuck it up.”

“I’m not,” Archy said.

“Don’t let your boy fuck it up, either.”

“Nat?”

“Man, what is his problem?”

“He being touchy?”

“Kind of like.”

“Dude can be touchy,” Archy said.

If upon first arriving at the store this morning, the affable Mr. Gibson “G Bad” Goode had, as might be imagined, attempted to exchange a few pleasantries with Mr. Nat “Royal Pain” Jaffe, by the time Archy walked into Brokeland, the two men no longer appeared to be on speaking terms. They had installed themselves at opposite ends of the store, Nat perched at the cash register, affecting to conduct a careful audit of some check stubs in a scarred black binder, Goode way at the back, fingering a strand of painted beads in the Miles Davis curtain while he flipped through the hip-hop bins. A sweet-sounding copy of Melting Pot by Booker T. & The MG’s (Stax, 1971) was playing over the store system, and by the turntablism of chance, the record that Goode was lifting from the bin as Archy came in was a twelve-inch single of Roxanne Shanté’s “Live On Stage” (Breakout, 1989), built on the bedrock of sampled Booker T.

Goode spun around when Archy came through the door, but Nat just sat there, hunched on his stool like some high-collared miser out of Charles Dickens, crooked as a finger on a guitar string, humming like a struck length of wire.

“Yo, yo, yo,” Archy said. The hat of dread still gripped his brow, but he played things light and innocent, stalling for time as he sampled the atmosphere in the store, checked the thermometer, scanned the length of tape in the seismograph. Needles jigged. Gauges and meters all ran into the red.

“Mr. Stallings,” Gibson Goode said.

He stuck Roxanne Shanté under his arm and rolled on the trucks of an invisible skateboard to the front of the store, wearing a thousand dollars’ worth of T-shirt and jeans. Archy considered a final burst of evasion, acting as if he had never met Gibson Goode, never flown in his zeppelin, could not imagine what might have brought the man into his little old Telegraph Avenue used-record store on this fine August afternoon. But no, the time had come. Archy needed to man up, take hold of himself. Confess that he had known a moment of weakness. That he was tempted by the offer to run the Beats Department, get a regular paycheck, boss some other folks around.

Then, when he opened his mouth, the usual tangle of lies and evasions came spooling out.

“Oh my goodness,” he said. “Look who it is! Nat, you know who this is?”

“I do, in fact.”

G Bad and Archy pitched the tent of a handshake over themselves, struck it, folded it up, put it away. Archy glanced over at his partner. Nat wore the look he got when he was listening to something amazing that was new to him. A fleer of analysis, like he was startled to learn that he could have missed this before, given that he knew everything about anything worth knowing.

“Check it out, Nat. Gibson Goode. In our store.”

“Totally.”

“I know you’re excited about that.”

“Yep.”

“Did you so express it to him?”

“Oh, he did, he did,” said Goode.

“You used to get your hair cut here, isn’t that right, now?” Archy put the question like an interviewer on 20/20, lobbing him a softball. “Back when it was Spencer’s?”

Nat looked up from the three-tier checkbook, betraying the mildest curiosity toward Goode. “Lot of folks got cut here,” Nat said amiably.

“Did you?” Goode said.

They clocked each other, their gazes two sets of radar guns.

“Before my time,” Nat said.

“Get rid of all this vinyl, put a few barber chairs in here, place looks pretty much the same,” Goode said. He took out and opened a tin of Flow-brand breath mints, which he had long had a deal to endorse, and offered one to Nat, who shook his head. “Pretty much.”

“Stick around,” Nat said. “You can come to the second COCHISE meeting, it’s at noon.”

“Noon? What’s the holdup?” Goode said without missing a beat. “Sounds to me like y’all been having meetings every five motherfucking minutes around here.”

“I might like to have a meeting right now,” Nat said. “Archy? Partners’ meeting? Open to the general public. Stick around for that, at least, G Bad.” He gestured to Walter and Taku outside the window. “They can come, too.”

“Nat—”

“You, what, you here to offer Archy a job?”

Goode saw how it was, that Nat knew nothing, had heard nothing from Archy. “That’s between he and I.” He smiled. “I’m the competition. I don’t need to tell you what I plan to do.”

“Plan to or already did?”

“He offered me a job, Nat,” Archy said. “Manager of the music department.”

“The Beats Department, I believe it’s to be called.”

“That is correct,” Goode said.

“Manager,” Nat said. “Hey, that’s great. Congratulations.”

“I didn’t say yes.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, did you say no?”

Goode taking it all in, scanners lit and feeding information to the option-running brain.

“At one point,” Archy said. “Maybe not definitively.”

Nat hooked a thumb in Archy’s direction. “Get used to that kind of thing,” he told Goode.

Archy felt blood in his cheeks, the shame of the ponderer in a world that urged decision. A deliberator nipped at and harried by the hounds of haste. Professing in his heart like some despised creed the central truth of life: The only decision a man will never regret is the one he never made.

“How about that old man of yours,” Goode said. “Mr. Strutter. He ever turn up again?”

The question caught Archy off guard, Luther a pot he thought he had slapped a lid onto one time already that morning. He began to understand, though not yet to accept, that sooner or later his father—out there scheming, rolling some kind of Julie Jaffe−style D&D dice—would have to be faced, dealt with.

“Not that I know of,” he said, trying to figure where Goode was going with this line of questioning.

“Your father?” Nat said. “How is he mixed up in all this?”

“You know our mutual friend Brother Flowers going to find him,” Goode said. “With or without your help. Got all his people, got those nephews, out there looking everywhere. Lot of folks owing Brother Flowers something, could find themselves able to wipe out a lot of debt real fast. Come up with a house number. Name of a motel.”

“So be it,” Archy said. “Whatever. I can’t go there, you know?”

“No?

“No, man, I can’t think about that now.”

“You might want to start soon.”

Goode’s tone was cool, matter-of-fact, unconcerned with the fate or the whereabouts of Luther Stallings, and Archy saw, catching up at last, that the warning was directed at him. Goode was trying to remind him that the job offer with Dogpile had been, and remained, conditional on his helping Flowers track Luther down.

“I surely will,” Archy said. “I will start thinking about it, sure enough. The day after tomorrow.”

A beautiful phrase to the ponderer, the day after tomorrow. The address of utopia itself.

“Okay, let me try for one second to pretend like I understand,” Nat said. “Not only do you, Archy, not plan to help me get out in front of this thing, reach out to the neighborhood, start pressing the city, the Planning Commission, on the DEIR, so forth? But you are actively considering going to work for this guy at Dogpile. Do I have that right?”

“You might,” Archy said. “Or perhaps you might not.”

“Archy, what the fuck?”

“Nat,” Archy said, “for a good many years, I have been trying as hard as I can, and in good faith, to answer your rhetorical questions. Today, just this one time, I’m afraid this particular rhetorical question is going to have to comport itself in the traditional manner, which I believe is to not need an answer from me or from anyone.”

“Arch,” Nat said, and for the first time his eyes, his voice, betrayed a certain desperation, a wince of genuine pain. “I need you. You can’t just sit this out. We have to actively oppose this asshole.”

“Seriously?” Goode said, showing pain himself, though it was the broader, more universal pain of reckoning with fools. “You going to do that, Stallings? Cost this neighborhood where you grew up, like, two-fifty, three hundred good-paying jobs? I don’t know how much in revenue, tax base? Neighborhood revitalization? Sense of pride?”

“Maybe,” Archy said, soothing himself with the feel of the words, two cool sides of a smooth round stone between his fingers. “Maybe not. For the time being, I have a neutral stance.”

“Oh, uh-huh,” Goode said. “Okay.”

“Fuck that,” Nat said. At last he abandoned the pretense of bookkeeping, closed the cover on the three-level checkbook, slapped his pencil down. Pouring himself off the high stool like Snoopy going from vulture to snake. “No, you don’t. I mean it, Archy. Either you are fucking me over here, or you are helping me out. Which is it?”

Archy and his brown shoes made their way around the counter, and he brushed up close against Nat, taking some kind of ugly satisfaction in the way his partner stepped back. Even though he knew that Nat was far from a physical coward, had gotten his hothead self into more fights and public dustups than Archy over the years by a factor of ten. Archy activated all the force fields of coolth, calm, and collectedness built in to the circuitry of his Iron Man armor. Nothing to fight about, no need for alarm. He took down the framed copy of Redbonin’ that he had hung on the wall the day of the first COCHISE meeting. He propped the frame on its bottom edge along the counter, opened the triangular foot cut into the cardboard backing, angled it so that the photograph of Mr. Jones’s freckled face, looking young and fierce, could stare down Gibson Goode. The disc itself stood among the hold items on the shelf behind the register in its paper sleeve. Archy slid it out, held it up to the window, watching the daylight flow like water across the shimmer of the grooves. A Very Fine example of a scarce release, believed to be among the smallest runs of all CTI pressings. He laid the record on the turntable’s platter and cued the first track, a cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar.

Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.

Archy pressed the button that raised the tonearm of the Marantz 6300 he had restored to its veneer and steel glory after Nat rescued it from a curbside trash heap in Montclair. In the silence that followed, he returned disc to sleeve, sleeve to album.

“Nat,” Archy said, “I’m sorry. I know I am the most unhelpful, indecisive, useless partner you could have. And Mr. Goode, I apologize for how rude and how ungrateful I probably seem to you regarding your generous offer. But right now, and for the next forty-eight hours, until I see that man safe and resting peaceful in the ground?” With both hands, like a ring-card girl, he raised the record high, flashing the face of Mr. Jones now at Nat, now at G Bad. “Fuck both of y’all.”

He nodded to himself as much as to both his interlocutors and then, tucking the record up under his arm, set out, feeling mysteriously free, for the first time in days, of regret, ready for whatever might come, and bound, as ever, for the day after tomorrow.

A last morning flag of summer, blue banded with gold and peach, unfurled slowly over the streets as the two wanderers, denizens of the hidden world known to rogues, gamblers, and swordsmen as “the Water Margin,” made their way along the Street of Blake toward the ancestral stronghold of the Jew-Tang Clan, its gables armored in cedar shakes faded to the color of dry August hills. Armed merely with subtle weapons of loneliness, they left behind them, like a trail of dead, the disappointment of their tenure at the School of the Turtle. They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away. And still boyhood operated on their minds, retaining all its former power to confound wishes with plans.

“I ain’t staying. Just so you know. Not hanging around.”

“Just a couple of days.”

“Not even.”

“Well, just till we get some money.”

“I can get some money today. How much you got?”

“A hundred and seven dollars.”

“Huh.”

“A hundred and eight. I mean, it’s probably enough for the bus, but—”

“Bus will be like maybe a hundred.”

Their wish, wearing its mask of planning, was to seek out a legendary master in his hidden sanctuary among the deserts of the south and offer their blades to his service. The journey would be long and fraught with peril and was soberly considered impossible, but one of the boys had mastered the kung fu of desperation and the other the kung fu of love, and armed with these ancient techniques, they passed untouchable, protected from knowledge of the certainty of failure. At any rate, it was the end of summer, a season when the wishes of fourteen-year-old boys are wont to turn heedless of the facts. So they had returned to the house where one of the young men had been raised, in the time before he embraced the bitterness and romance of the Water Margin, hoping to find, by theft or pilferage, provision for their journey to the south.

“I would have had more than a hundred and eight dollars, only, like a fuckhead, I bought that stupid Viking helmet at the Solano Stroll back in April.”

“How much that thing cost?”

“Two hundred and twenty-five. Yeah, I know.”

“Damn.”

“I know. But, I mean, those are real horns. From a real bull.”

“Don’t even really fit you.”

“I have a freakishly big head.”

“Anyway, Viking helmets didn’t have horns.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t know you back then.”

“Whatever. I can get the money. If I have to do some, I don’t know, maybe some robbing, or, like, I know the combination of the safe where my auntie keep her money. So, yeah.”

“She keeps it in a safe?”

“Big heavy one. She got to, living in that house. She has almost, maybe, three hundred, three-fifty she been saving up to buy a new wig. Like a human-hair wig. Hair comes from India, they got these temples, you shave your head and it’s, what’s it, a sacrifice. I just get up inside that safe…”

“You know the combination?”

“I know everything but the last number. And the dial only goes up to fifty-nine, so.”

They approached the Jew-Tang stronghold with the stalking diffidence of cats, employing techniques of Silence and Lightness. In spite of their precautions and the intensity of focus they brought to bear, as they crept around to the back, they felt themselves observed.

“What in God’s name?”

“Oh. Hey, Mom.”

The matriarch of the clan stood at a kitchen window overlooking the back garden. It was known that she could see through shadows, whether in the corners of the world or of the human heart. At the mere sound of her voice, trained along with her eyes and ears by years of merciless study of the tendency of men and plans to go awry, the grand enterprise they had mutually proposed during the flight from the School of the Turtle fell to improbable pieces in her son’s mind. The young men turned to gaze up at her, awful in the slanting light, dressed in sober habiliments as though to go before some tribunal, probing their souls with her picklock gaze. In one hand she held a cup and in the other the strip of transparent little boxes in which she stored her mysterious week of pills, the crushed and bitter formulations from which she derived many of the strange powers for which she was legendary.

“He, uh, we got kicked out,” said her son.

“We’re fine,” said the other.

“Kicked out?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Yes,” said her son.

All the ancient schools of lying, in their mountain fastnesses, and all the techniques they taught were of no avail against this subtle matriarch with the unbeatable kung fu of her Nine Intensities Steel Gaze. The only hope for escape, her son knew, was to tell a version of the truth, to scoot your lie beneath the fingertips of her attention under a sheepskin of truth and pray for an instant of blindness.

“But, just, only for today,” said her son. “Carpet cleaning.”

“Archy is having his carpet cleaned.”

“Yeah.”

“I see. Turn it down?”

“What?”

“Can you please turn it down? What is that?”

“Return to Forever.”

“Yeesh. Thank you. And what’s with the, uh, luggage?”

“The washing machine is broken. We came over to do T’s laundry.”

The one denoted by that mystic initial nodded, but it was plain to the son that the mother disbelieved every word of the story, as she likely also would have done had he been telling the truth.

“They had a fight,” tried her son, hoisting his tattered scrap of sheepskin higher. “Him and Archy.”

“He.”

“He and Archy had a fight. Archy kicked him out.”

“What? What kind of fight?”

“Not, like, violent or anything, but, so, we just came back here to, you know. We’re back.”

His mother nodded agreeably, a clear indicator of disbelief, and dismissed her son from her consideration. “What do you have to say about it?” she asked the other young man.

For a long couple of seconds during which emperors were poisoned and kingdoms squandered and prophets calamitously disbelieved, there was no reply.

“I’m hungry,” said the other young man.

“Are you, now?” said the matriarch. “And, so, why didn’t you two come in the front door?”

It took an extended interval of mutual silent interrogation for one of them to devise a plausible reply.

“Because we were hungry? And the kitchen is in the back of the house?” said her son, and saw weariness roll across her eyes like a fog.

“Get in here,” she said.

Tired and footsore, they trudged up the steps of a fir-wood terrace that overlooked the raked pebbles and dwarf cypress of the back garden. They unslung their packs and racked their weapons and stepped across the ancient sandstone threshold of the kitchen, haunted by the smoke of a thousand banquets and revels, with its vaulted ceiling and its deep stone walls. By the time they entered, she had already lit fires, rendered fats in mighty kettles, wrung the necks of ducks and chickens.

“I got leftover pancakes in the freezer,” she said. “I can microwave them. That’s it. I have a meeting, I have a crazy day. I have to go.”

“We’re fine.”

“Honestly, Mom. For real. You can go.”

But they sat at the table where, over the years, noted rogues and gentleman killers had gathered to praise the hospitality of the house and empty its cellars of rice wine, its larders of ducks hung from hooks like pleats of a long curtain. And the matriarch of Jew-Tang lay before them a feast of noodles leafed with fat, roasted organs, pickled trotters, eggs that had lain treasured for three winters in the ground.

“Take some syrup,” she said, arms folded across the front of the short gray silk jacket she wore. “So you want to move back in?”

“He— Oops.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Julie. Here’s a napkin. Mop it up.”

“You know I don’t,” said the other. “And you don’t want me to. You don’t like me.”

“If I didn’t like you,” said the matriarch of Jew-Tang, in the epigrammatic style she favored, “I would never give you the satisfaction of telling you that I didn’t.”

“I ain’t staying.”

“Okay. So what’s the plan, then.”

The boys consulted each other by not consulting, spoke without speaking, sought each other’s gaze by keeping their eyes resolutely on their plates.

“I will break you down, Julius.”

Her son laid down his eating implements, carved from the tooth of a sea unicorn, and sighed. “It’s all stupid,” he said. “Come on, Titus, you know that it is. Like Quentin Tarantino is ever going to let you, just, ‘Oh, hi, I’m fourteen and I look twelve, so, like, which way to my trailer, motherfucker?’”

And his companion hid his face behind his hands and wept.

“You had a fight with your dad,” the matriarch said after a decent interval had passed, handing him a cloth to wipe his eyes.

“Whatever.”

“You can stay here,” the mother said. “You can stay here as long as you want to or need to, Titus.”

“I ain’t staying.”

“Look, I’m sure you are a genius of cinema in the budding. No, I’m serious, I read your screenplay, and what do I know, but I thought it seemed very good. But Quentin Tarantino needs you to be at least eighteen years old before he can take you under his wing. If nothing else, I’m sure they have union rules to govern that kind of thing. Now, look, I have to go. I’m already late. Can you tell me in twenty-five seconds or less what is making you sad?”

The knight of secret grief seemed to ponder this question for a period whose duration impressed his stout companion.

“She didn’t get her pillow,” he said at last.

“What? Who didn’t?”

Quickly, her son narrated, as well as he could, the failed early-morning raid by the Empress on the School of the Turtle.

“She can’t sleep without it,” Titus said. “It’s, like, stressing her out. It’s probably stressing my brother out, too.”

“I’m sure your brother is fine,” said the matriarch. “But I tell you what.”

She left and returned a minute later carrying a cushion crafted, in barbarian lands of the north, from the innermost down of the snow goose.

With an awful solemnity, bowing her head, she entrusted them with the Long Cushion of Untroubled Slumber.

“What you boys need,” said the matriarch, “is, clearly, something to do.”

Gwen crept up the narrow stairs, let herself in with the spare key. Slipped off her espadrilles to cross the polished wood floor of the dojo, with its faint Parmesan dusting of the smell of feet and, by the weapon racks, its dark, aqueous mirror wall. She was stalked as she passed by the hiss of her soles sticking to, peeling away from, the cold bamboo floor. The mirror wall seemed to harbor as much shadow as it banished, as if it bottled the reflections of past students, forty years of West Oakland youth trying to kick, punch, and style their way out of their lives.

Though it spooked her to be alone with that shade-haunted mirror, Gwen was glad to find the place deserted. She did not care to face her teacher again so soon. She planned to retrieve her scant belongings and be gone before Irene Jew returned from her Thursday-morning appointment with the traditional Chinese doctor who rectified her qi.

Master Jew had sent her out that morning, her resolve cinched with the knotted black belt of the old lady’s counsel, to accomplish a clear, simple, even rudimentary objective: Retrieve one pillow, used, not especially valuable. But, like everything she did nowadays—as she had realized aloud while talking to the state senator from Illinois—the rescue mission turned out to be wasted time.

It seemed probable that she had been wasting her time from her arrival in California in 1994. She looked back with embarrassment now on that Gwen Shanks, showing up in Berkeley with her nursing degree from Hopkins, a letter of recommendation to Aviva Roth-Jaffe, and grandiose plans to restore, to her obstetrically diplomate family and to the black community at large, its rich ancestral heritage of midwifery. For a long time Gwen’s gifted hands, steady nerve, and the way patients tended to fall for her skeptical good humor about their hippy-trippy whoop-de-doo had served to mask the cavernous echo, when you tuned your ear for the sound of black voices, of the waiting room. Now that silence was all she could hear. As for her marriage, she had fallen in love with Archy Stallings having no illusions about his sexual past or his strength of character. But the outbreak of forgiveness that followed each new transgression of her husband’s, as typhus followed a flood, called into question the difference, if any, between illusion and its willful brother, delusion, with its crackpot theories and its tinfoil hat.

It was not supposed to have gone like that for Gwendolyn Ward Shanks. From Mrs. Hampt’s kindergarten at Georgetown Day School, which she had entered already knowing how to read Little Women, through Jack and Jill, to Howard University, where she had graduated first in her class and been elected president of the Alpha chapter, Gwen had been trained, equipped—her father would have said that she had been bred—to succeed. To fulfill the ambitions of her ancestors and justify the care they had taken to marry well, aim high, climb hard, and pull together. Gwen recalled a lecture of Julie’s, delivered one night when he was ten or eleven, on the difference between terraforming and pantropy. When you changed a planet’s atmosphere and environment to suit the needs of human physiology, that was terraforming; pantropy meant the alteration of the human form and mind to allow survival, even prosperity, on a harsh, unforgiving world. In the struggle to thrive and flourish on the planet of America, some black people had opted for the epic tragedy, grand and bitter, of terraforming; others, like Gwen’s parents and their parents and grandparents before them, had engaged in a long and selective program of pantropy. Black pantropy had produced, in Gwen and her brothers, a clutch of viable and effortless success-breathers, able to soar and bank on thermals of opportunity and defy the killing gravity of the colony world.

It had turned out that Gwen was unprepared for life on the surface of the planet Brokeland. Over the past week, at last, she had begun to succumb to the weird air and crushing gravity of it all. Little by little she had surrendered every gift and hard-won attribute of dignity and ambition until, finally, following the incident at Queen of Sheba and the bloody mess of Baby Frankenthaler’s birth, she had lost the one remaining advantage she possessed, the most precious, the hardest-won: her cool. As Julie Jaffe would no doubt put it: Fail!

Now there was the board that had been called into session for this afternoon, empowered, duty-bound to drag Gwen through the whole botched delivery all over again. She couldn’t face that, and she couldn’t face Aviva. She no longer wanted to be a midwife, any more than she wanted to be married to Archy or stepmother to his child. She loathed kung fu, herself, and Oakland. She had never liked the Bay Area, with its irresolute and timid weather, the tendency of its skies in any season to bleed gray, the way it had arranged its hills and vistas like a diva setting up chairs around her to ensure the admiration of visitors. The people around here were fetishists and cultists, prone to schism and mania, liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken. She had to get her shit out of the little upstairs room before Irene Jew got back from the qi fixer, pile it into the back of the car, and light out for someplace. Some town without fixations, one that had sent its vinyl records to the dump and would eat any kind of an egg you set before it. She had hoisted every sail to catch the rising wind of her panic; there was no telling what bleak tropic she might yet strike.

As she crossed the floor to the poster of Lee rampant, another door swung open, nearly smacking Gwen in the face. It was the door behind which lay a half bath with a PVC stall shower, one that boomed like a drum whenever Gwen rotated herself inside it.

“Oh, I’m—Oh, hi!”

It was Valletta Moore. Though she was ravaged by time, smoke, and a ponderous hand with the makeup brush, there was no mistaking her. A pinup photo of the woman in her heyday, clipped from an old Ebony, hung on the wall of Gwen’s father’s basement workshop back in Mitchellville, where, taking pride of place among the tools on their hooks and the screws in their baby-food jars, it had troubled Gwen’s adolescence with all the ways in which Valletta Moore—tall, light-skinned, with planetary breasts—differed from Gwen, while evidently constituting her father’s ideal of black womanhood.

Even without the stiletto heels that, in the picture on her father’s wall, had launched Valletta like Saturn V rockets into the stratosphere of her Afro, the woman was tall, a couple of inches under six feet. Had to be at least fifty but showing, with the help of a skirt that seemed to have been made by taking a few passes with a black ACE bandage around her hips and upper thighs, enough leg to string with telephone wire, carry startling messages to the world. Hair pulled back tight and glossy against her head, lips shining with purple paint. Her madly green eyes, in the instant before they vanished behind a pair of big Dolce & Gabbanas, betrayed an unmistakable half-canine look of guilty surprise. Caught, Gwen thought, in the act.

Valletta Moore put her head down, shouldered a large red plastic handbag, and with a cool nod, slid past Gwen. In a blasphemous pair of heeled pumps, she went clicking across the sacrosanct floor of the dojo. The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed from the waistband of her tiny skirt like the banner of an advertising airplane pretty much spoiled the effect.

“Oh! Um. Miss—Ms. Moore.”

The woman stopped, and in the instant of her hesitation, the clatter of her exit echoed in the empty studio. She started to turn back to Gwen, then reconsidered. She shouldered the bag again, walked away with no reply.

“Go on, then, Valletta. Fly that flag,” Gwen said. “Always good to have some extra toilet paper on you. You never know.”

A taut-fleshed, claw-fingered, but elegant hand emerged from Valletta’s front of haughtiness like a stagehand sent backstage to retrieve a leading lady’s tumbled wig. The hand felt around behind with a frantic helplessness that touched Gwen enough to impel her forward to help. Valletta whipped around and jumped back when she saw what Gwen was up to.

“Hi,” Gwen said, dangling the strip of toilet paper between three fingers from about the height of her right shoulder, as if she expected a yo-yo to materialize on the other end of it.

“Look at that,” said Valletta Moore with a hint of accusation and reproach.

Like boxers or circling cocks, they appraised each other. Their respective cryonic targeting arrays were brought online and deployed. Where their gazes met, great snowbanks heaved up between them. The air chimed with the crack of ice.

“Any other way I can help you?” Gwen said. “Does Mrs. Jew know you’re here?”

Valletta Moore took in the spectacle of Gwen’s belly, squinting one eye as though staring along the edge of a plank to gauge its trueness. “Who you supposed to be?”

“Who’m I supposed to be? Like I’m trick-or-treating?”

Gwen caught a whiff of the other woman’s perfume, something dense and somehow reminiscent of the smell of Froot Loops, maybe Poison. She recalled having detected a whiff of it, like the pressure of an incipient migraine behind the eyeballs, her first night in the secret room. If Valletta Moore was not herself a former pupil of Mrs. Jew, then Gwen reasoned that maybe Archy’s father had returned to the Bruce Lee Institute, seeking refuge and shelter in the hands of his old teacher, departing just before Gwen showed up.

Great. It had been shameful enough fleeing to the dingy spider hole, behind the hidden door, when she could at least imagine herself to be following, as Master Jew had given her to understand, in the footsteps of fugitive lamas and persecuted practitioners of Falun Gong. But maybe all this time she had been filing herself alongside a squirrelly old no-account basehead and his washed-up ex-ex-girlfriend in a drawer marked, everlastingly, Fail!

“How’d you get in here?” Gwen said.

“I have a key.”

“I heard there was only one extra key.”

When Valletta snapped open her handbag to fish out and brandish her own key to the door of the institute, Gwen glimpsed against the red satin lining a hole in the universe that was exactly the shape of a large handgun, just sitting there absorbing all light on the visible spectrum.

“How’d you get a key?” Gwen said steadily, though her heart swam in her chest, kicking like the boy who inhabited her. “You take lessons here?”

She glanced across the studio to the glass cabinet where Mrs. Jew had amassed a gold-brass conurbation of trophies ranked in dusty skylines. Generations of insect citizens had abandoned their husks and limbs in its necropolitan streets. Propped along the back of the topmost shelf, a half-dozen framed black-and-white photographs depicted Mrs. Jew with some of her most successful colleagues and students, among them the future Kato, looking grave as a mycologist in a white gi, and a handsome brother in a tall natural, bent down to get his smiling face alongside that of his tiny sifu, a man whom Gwen had long since identified as Archy’s father, Luther Stallings. She first learned of the Bruce Lee Institute from Archy, who recommended it solely on the basis of the sheepish nostalgia that informed many of his recommendations, back in the fall of 2000, after somebody told her that martial arts might help with the lingering stiffness that getting rear-ended by a Grand Wagoneer had left in her knees and lower back.

“You used to be a student here, too?”

The “too” hung there, unglossed, a pin to hold the map threads strung by Gwen as she worked her way from the woman standing in front of her; to the photograph of Luther Stallings in the trophy case; to his estranged son, a memory of him crying in the bathroom at their wedding, relieved and crushed because his daddy, conforming perfectly to Archy’s expectations but not, alas, to his hopes, had failed to show; to stories she had heard from Archy about crack houses and court appearances and, long ago, a naked woman shaving her legs in the bathroom of a Danish modern bachelor pad in El Cerrito.

“I know you?” Valletta Moore said, clearly doubting it.

“We’ve never met,” Gwen said. “My name is Gwen Shanks. I know who you are.” Knowing it was probably a mistake yet unable to let the woman, pathetic as she might be, have the satisfaction of thinking that Gwen had recognized her famous face from the movies or from, say, a glossy pinup stuck to the wall of a garage workshop twenty years ago, Gwen added, “I’m married to Archy Stallings.”

“What? Get the fuck out.” Valletta Moore pushed up her sunglasses and dazzled Gwen with green. “You are? You and Archy having a baby?”

“No, I’m just incredibly fat.”

“Not really?”

“No,” Gwen confessed. “I’m just feeling sorry for myself.”

“Oh, honey.”

“I mean, wow. Valletta Moore. How are you?”

“How am I?” She seemed to teeter on some edge. “I am doing what I have to do, you know what I’m saying?”

“I ought to by now.”

“And I am trying to stay fly.”

“Oh, you are. Most definitely.”

“Thank you, honey. What are you… You living here now?”

“I was just— No. Right now I’m moving.”

“You and Archy aren’t together?”

“No, ma’am. Not right now. I guess we—”

“You don’t need to say nothing. If that boy has, like, only ten, fifteen percent of what his daddy came equipped with, then you got my full sympathy, and you don’t need to say nothing else.”

“Is he all right? Luther? Is he… in trouble?”

Valletta seemed to try to decide how best to answer. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, Gwen, but I really have to leave.” She took a step toward Gwen. Leaned in. Swept Gwen up for three seconds in a riot of perfume and hair oil and piña colada–flavored gum. “All right, now. You take care.” Again she adjusted the heavy burden on her right shoulder and started to turn away.

“Are you in trouble?” Gwen said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Stay fly,” said Valletta Moore, hurriedly reversing the terms of her equation. “And do what you got to do.”

Then she was gone. Gwen weighed her parting words, wondering at how a certain warmth kindled in her chest at the sound of them, almost like the flame of nostalgia. They rang a bell; a snatch of lyric, a parting line tossed to the crowd at the end of a live album. A catchphrase. Ah. It must be something that her character said in one of those dreadful movies she was in. Taking the yoke of a plummeting cargo plane, just before leaping from a fire escape to the roof of a passing uptown bus, strapping on for a showdown with a gang of heroin dealers. Or with a hospital review board.

Gwen went into the secret room, and instead of packing up her things and lighting out, as she had planned, she submitted her clothing to harsh inspection, trying to find something that would do for the board. Nothing: She would have to go shopping; there was just enough time for that and a trip to Glama. All the while the words echoed and re-echoed, and finally, in mid-carom, she caught them: Do what you got to do, and stay fly. They were the parting words of Candygirl Clark, the character played by Valletta Moore in the Strutter movies. As she undressed, Gwen wondered whether the phrase was something cooked up by the screenwriter, some Jewish dude trying to think like an ass-kicking soul sister, or if they had started out as an ad lib, something that Valletta used to say for real. She went into the bathroom, wrapped in a towel that strained to girdle her, her hair tucked under a shower cap, and noticed that the lid of the toilet tank had been knocked off-kilter. She looked inside and saw a plastic bag taped to the inside of the tank, slit open, empty. The lid of the tank tolled like a bell as she restored it.

There were all kinds of things wrong with her life, and as they swarmed her, she did an admirable job of identifying and taxonomizing them. As a meteorologist of failure, she had proven her mettle in the teeth of an informational storm. That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed. She ran the water in the shower, letting it get hot, watching her face in the steel mirror until it vanished like San Francisco into a summer fog. She took the water onto the load-bearing points of her body as hot as she could stand, hoping to undo some of the kinks from another night without the body pillow. When she emerged from the bathroom, feeling luminous, giving off steam, she found that the most recent of her troubles had taken it upon itself to find its own way, literally, to the door. To a door, at any rate. Against the bottom of the black-and-white photographic poster of Bruce Lee, propped against the sheet of Lucite that covered it, bent at the center as though to duck and allow Bruce, feet and fists flying, to hurdle it in a single, unending, eternally incomplete bound, lay a large, plump pin-striped body pillow. On the floor beside it lay a square of yellow sales slip on the back of which Julie Jaffe had written, in his antic all-caps hand, DO WHAT YOU GOT TO DO AND STAY FLY.

In the seat by the center door of the 1, a young Latina mother with her hair pulled up into a palm tree atop her head sat yoked by the string of a pair of earbuds to a little boy on her lap, a bud apiece in each left ear. The little boy was holding by its remaining arm what appeared to be a Goliath action figure from the old animated Gargoyles program. Long ago, it had been Goliath’s orotund voice, stony musculature, and leonine coiffure that stirred in little-kid Julie, as he watched Gargoyles on the Disney Channel, what he recalled with poignance as his first conscious erection. The show had since gone off the air, and the little boy probably did not even known who Goliath was, how much tragedy there was in his gargoyle past, in the lives of all the gargoyle race. To him the toy was only an imperfect enigma, at once cool and ruined. His mother probably bought him broken old secondhand toys off of eBay, to save money, or shopped for him amid the desolation of the children’s bins at Goodwill. Or maybe she worked cleaning houses for women who gave away to their servants their children’s old, broken things. The little boy probably thought of Goliath as simply a toy monster. Such bias and ignorance were, after all, the usual portion of monsters. Julie felt a stab of sympathy toward monsters and toward himself, but most of all, he felt sorry for the little boy with his armless plaything and his one earbud. Julie always found ample cause for sorrow in his fellow passengers on the bus.

“Ain’t my grandma,” Titus was saying.

“I know, but still.”

“You saying you would not want to get up in that.”

It was hard to imagine wanting to, but Julie felt no need to say so. Nor did he point out that, for example, a swordswoman wearing a steel brassiere and chain mail, occasionally subject to fits of magical bloodlust, was theoretically awesome in more or less the same way that Valletta Moore was awesome, but if, say, Red Sonja were to turn up on the Number 1 bus, headed for downtown Oakland, the question of whether or not to, quote, get up in that, unquote, would not necessarily feature in Julie’s first series of internal discussions on the matter. And that was leaving aside the whole question of her possibly being somebody’s grandmother.

“Sure,” Julie said presently. “Totally.”

“Faggot.”

“Hate speech.”

As if in reply—a reply uttered in the silent and intricate language they used to transact the secret business that underwrote their friendship—Titus took hold of Julie’s hand and pressed it against the fly of his jeans. They were at the back of a spiffy new Van Hool, segmented and capacious, and there was no one in the seats behind or around them, but the bus was far from empty, and you would not have said that Titus’s move was quite covert. Julie pressed his palm against that straining arc of denim, rocked it back and forth, fingers spread. Titus kept his eyes on Valletta, imagining, Julie understood, that he was up in that. In the rape scene that opened Mayflower Black, Valletta Moore bared breasts that had the graceful architecture of eggplants, paler than the rest of her, nipples fleshy, aureoles far-flung. When she stabbed her white rapist in the throat, improvising a shiv with a shard of broken vinyl LP, rolling off him, you could see, in freeze-frame, there! and there! the tangled shadow of her bush. No doubt Titus was making use of some of that material now. He was not, Julie knew, picturing Julie naked. He was probably not even thinking that it was Julie reaching to unbutton his fly.

Julie’s fingers staged a brief bit of comedy with the buttons and the waistband of Titus’s boxer briefs, in which Titus’s dick played the role of clown bursting from a pint-sized car, snake liberated from the fake can of nuts. Smooth and cool against the hand as gargoyle stone. As he played with Titus, Julie tried to look at Valletta Moore the way he imagined that Titus was looking at her, but all he could manage was the idea that his lips were Valletta’s, a vivid O painted red around Titus’s penis. That his head was bobbing up and down and mechanically in Titus’s lap the way Valletta’s had done during her love scene with Luther Stallings in Strutter at Large. The idea that Julie could ever resemble Valletta Moore, in this or any way, struck him as only slightly more likely than his being able to get up in her, and he smiled at his poor little gargoyle self. Things went as far as they could between Titus and Julie’s fingers without causing cleanup issues. Titus brushed Julie’s hand aside and, still looking at Valletta, buttoned himself up. He gave Julie’s fingers a gentle squeeze.

Julie said, “Seriously, dude, you shouldn’t say ‘faggot.’”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“I’m serious. It’s—”

Titus said, “You go right ahead, call me ‘n—’”

“Oh, yeah, right.”

“I really don’t care.”

“Yes, you do.”

Titus frowned, half-closed his eyes, rehearsing the scene in his mind. Slouched low next to Julie, legs sprawled out into the handicap area, Nikes slanted like a couple of Easter Island heads. Taking up about a third of Julie’s seat, too. “Probably true,” he conceded.

“Anyway, I never would call you something like that.”

“Yeah, whatever, Wavy Gravy. Peace and love.”

“Want some tempeh?”

Titus’s eyes behind his Run-DMCs bore in on the back of Valletta’s head as she stared at the bus window opposite or, less likely, at whatever there was to see on the far side of the glass. As though to offer evidence of the terminal crunchiness, the megadoses of rainbow radiation, to which Titus felt Julie had been overexposed in his sheltered Berkeley youth, they rolled past the ruin of the Bit o’ Honey bar. The Bit o’ Honey, owned by some Black Panthers, was mentioned twice in a book on Panther history that Peter van Eder had loaned them. The Minister of Defense, Huey Newton, had been jumped and beaten in the parking lot, and a few nights later, perhaps in retaliation, someone named Everett “Popcorn” Hughes had been shot inside the bar. Now, affixed to one of the Baghdad-quality blast shutters that blinded the Bit o’ Honey’s face, a bold if oddly worded sign announced, in lean sans-serif letters, that the site would soon be home to the MindBridge Center for the Study of Human Consumption.

“I think I know where tempeh comes from,” Julie said.

“Okay,” Titus said to the back of Valletta Moore’s head. “Where we going?”

“The Number One goes to East Oakland. Out, um, International, kinda like, Fruitvale, I think.”

Julie knew that Titus had not been asking about the bus route and where it might lead them. The gist of his question had been: Where is she going? They had literally bumped into her, emerging with a dreamlike matter-of-factness from the front door of the Bruce Lee Institute. The body pillow serving to absorb, like an air bag, Julie’s impact with the woman. At that point, enveloped in the deep, cool cushion of her fragrance, Julie had sort of recognized her, thinking, That woman looks like her and smells how I would imagine her smelling how funny since I have just seen all six of the nine films in which she appeared between 1974 and 1978 and which are available on DVD or VHS I wonder how old she is if she was born in like 1954, and then when they came back outside, having left the pillow and note for Gwen, and saw the woman waiting by the bus shelter across Telegraph, he had known her for certain: Valletta Moore, in the flesh. High, fine, feline, with that Candygirl Clark aloofness, but looking, to the eye of a rainbow-irradiated East Bay boy, maybe a touch on the tranny side.

Titus got very quiet when he recognized her, the way only Titus could get quiet, shutting down nonessential systems, patching all available impulse power to the sensors. There was Valletta Moore, waiting for AC Transit, tapping her cell phone against her hip, face unreadable behind her foreign-dictator shades but standing folded into herself, with impatience or the need to pee. Her head fixing like a radar dish on every car that passed her. Going somewhere. Looking out for someone.

The possibility that she was on her way to a rendezvous with Luther Stallings occurred to both boys simultaneously, since in the interval between the doorway collision and now, they had not only deposited the body pillow by the door behind which (a thought as fearsome to Julie as that of having sexual intercourse with Valletta Moore or Red Sonja) the naked expanse of Gwen Stallings was evidently being lathered and rinsed. They had also seen a framed photograph in the dusty trophy case: the picture of Luther Stallings in his prime, posed beside the crazy little Chinese sifu lady when she was only one hundred, and not one hundred and thirty-five, years old.

“Okay, check this out,” Titus had said, watching her in the bus shelter. Power restored to all systems. He’d patted at the side of his tidy natural with his dazzling palm. Then he had crossed the street in disregard of a don’t-walk signal and converging vehicles, with Julie bringing up the rear like an old worried grandpa. When the lady’s bus came, the boys got on it. They drew a line from the photograph, lost in the dust of kung fu oblivion, to Valletta Moore, and now they were riding the bus along that line as she took up the pencil and marked the course they might follow to find the magical man.

It would not be accurate to claim that Julie had no illusions as to whether Luther Stallings would turn out to be worthy of the admiration, regard, and even—in a way that was, at this point, almost pure fanboyishness—the love that Titus and, loving Titus, Julie felt toward the man. True, Julie Jaffe was one of those rare beings capable of adopting an optimistic view toward the past, and furthermore, he had experienced while watching the available filmography of Luther Stallings the kind of sexual arousal that must afflict Titus as he stared at Valletta Moore. Not because Stallings was beautiful—though he was, his litheness in fight scenes and action sequences like a base stealer’s, head down and ready to get some dirt on his pants. What got to Julie was the way Luther Stallings off-gassed something invisible that Julie wanted to call equipoise: unruffled, confident, prepared to improvise. Something so rare and fragile could not be entirely faked. Archy had the same quality, softened up, and so, in his turn, did Titus: There had to be some kind of genuine basis in the famous original.

A number of Julie’s illusions remained intact, therefore, at the end of the ride as he followed Titus, who was following Valletta Moore, east to Franklin Street, where she opened her phone, made a brief call, then went into a takeout whose sign argued, with a certain apathy that must have been the fruit of language heedlessly applied, that it was properly known as EGG ROLL LOVING DONUT. But even without having heard the disparaging words and tone his father and Archy had used about Luther Stallings, Julie had read enough books and seen enough movies to suspect that if Titus ever did meet his grandfather, he was in for a disappointment, perhaps a grave one. Julie was so conscious of this possibility that as great a part of him hoped Valletta Moore was only stopping for a donut on the way to pay her electric bill, say, and had not seen Luther Stallings in twenty years, as hoped that they were seriously on the man’s trail. Titus showed nothing but scorn for Archy and had never said anything remotely to the effect that he had a hole in his heart in the shape of a father, but like an astronomer with an exoplanet, Julie could infer that hole’s presence from distortions in the field around Titus. It was there in the ambition and the scorn. It was there in the daring that led Titus to cut past Valletta Moore, duck ahead of her into Loving Donut with its brushed steel and white tile like a police morgue, and get in line before she did. Julie recalled having read in a spy novel that the best way to tail somebody was to walk ahead, but there was an élan to Titus’s move that went beyond spycraft.

Titus put in an order for six egg rolls and two glazed raised donuts; Julie paid the bill. Valletta Moore, taking no notice of either boy, ordered a chicken chow mein and a dozen egg rolls to go.

She paid for her food using coins of small denomination, slowly, seeming to get angrier with each one that she snapped down on the counter, as though the Asian lady at the cash register were rushing her or fouling up her math. The Asian lady said nothing at all, and her face gave away little, but in her very silence and patience, there was something that might have passed for contempt. Settling the tab took every nickel that Valletta Moore could raise in the clatter of her handbag. When the Asian lady offered to make up the four cents’ change, Valletta stared at the proffered pennies with distaste, as though they were something the Asian lady ought to take care of with a Handi Wipe. Then she carried her white paper bag out to the sidewalk, where the boys, cleverly, were already hot in advance on her trail. Their cover: two boys patronizing Loving Donut. Easy to remember, diabolic in its simplicity.

Julie declined to touch the paper bag that Titus held out to him, let alone its contents, whose reek of cabbage and burnt sugar caused his stomach, already twisted by the dread and bus-borne hand job and the thrill of pursuit, to seethe. “Did you see the oil they had those things cooking in?” he said.

“Biodiesel,” Titus said. “Run a Jetta.”

If you recorded Titus eating the six egg rolls and two donuts on film, Julie thought, and then ran the film in reverse, it would look as though he were firing them out of his mouth, pop, pop, like cannonballs from the mouth of a cannon. Thirty seconds after commencing his meal, he went inside to wash it down with a half pint of milk, also on Julie.

When Titus came back out of Loving Donut, he was just in time to witness the arrival of a very unfortunate Toronado. It juddered, and heaved, and disputed with unseen antagonists like some kind of Telegraph Avenue hobo. Rust had left bloody tooth marks along its underbelly and wheel beds. It might once have been gray or green, but since that remote era, the most irresolute painter in the history of automotives appeared to have tested out every known make and formulation of primer on all of its surfaces. Its driver slowed without stopping and leaned over to unhook a loop of yellow nylon that connected the right-side grab handle to the lock button of the passenger door. The door groaned open. Valletta effected a kind of flying hurdle into the passenger seat. She slammed the door shut and relooped the nylon cord over the lock button. Without missing a beat, she and the driver seemed immediately to resume some earlier argument, the report of which contended, as the car pulled away from the curb, with the hawking and rattling of the car’s emphysema, arthritis, TB.

At the wheel, indisputably, unmistakably: Luther Stallings.

“Damn,” said Titus, not without an air of truest wonder.

The hunt would have ended there, with the boys left to find their way back from Franklin Street, if Julie had not happened to spot a man in a turban coming out of the one-story office building next door to Loving Donut. He was holding a package of Rolaids and a small spray bottle of Febreze.

“This is going to be incredibly racist,” Julie warned Titus, or himself, or the censorious gods of his hometown.

The pathetic Toronado hit a red light at the corner of Twelfth and Broadway. Julie approached the gentleman in the turban and asked if he was, by any chance, a taxi driver, and if so, did he happen to have his taxicab handy?

Julie was to be spared having the racist underpinnings of the structure of his consciousness exposed to the world, at least for now, because it turned out that the door from which the man in the turban had emerged belonged to the dispatch center and main office of Berkeley-Oakland Yellow Cab of Oakland, Inc. Thus Julie’s rude and bigoted inquiry was transformed by chance proximity into a reasonable if not logical inference.

The man in the turban looked them up and down, holding the bottle of deodorant spray with a hint of admonishment, as though to suggest that he might be obliged, if they were planning to fuck with him, to Febreze them. “Who is wanting to know?” he said.

They found Mr. Singh’s Crown Victoria parked around the corner, bearing across the bottom of its doors, under the stenciled logo of Berkeley-Oakland Yellow Cab of Oakland, Inc., in slanted capital letters, the surprisingly furious legend GOD DAMN INDIA IMPERIALIST DESTROYER OF PURISTAN! The boys got into the back. Julie had twenty-one dollars left in his wallet. He hoped it would be enough to get them wherever they were going.

“Follow that car,” Titus said. There were a lot of ways to play the line; Titus chose to go with a touch of BBC, John Steed from The Avengers. That left Julie to fill out the role, at least in his mind, either of Mrs. Peel or of Tara King. It was not an easy decision to reach; each had its appeal.

“No, no. No games,” said Mr. Singh. “No, no, no. When you are getting onto an airplane, you do not tell the pilot, ‘Follow that Boeing.’”

“Maybe I might,” Titus said. “You don’t know.”

“I know this, ‘Follow that car,’ that is the way a taxi driver gets shot. No, no. No ‘Follow that car.’ Leave that car alone.”

“No, that lady left her wallet on the bus,” Julie said, brandishing his yellow plastic 21 Jump Street number. “We just want to give it back to her.”

“This is clearly a lie.”

“Seriously, yo,” Titus said, assuming a ghetto accent as freely and sincerely as he had the voice of Patrick Macnee. “Tha’s my moms in that car, aight? She been drinkin and dopin all day, and she don’t really, like, know that guy she with? And he be all dangerous and shit? Come on, man. We just trying to keep an eye out for my moms.”

A quaver came into his voice as he made the speech, authentic enough to spook Julie. The scenario came to Titus’s lips with a freedom, a note of faithfulness to lived experience, that made Julie ache as surely as the little boy with his one-armed gargoyle on the bus.

“That is sounding to me like a police matter,” Mr. Singh said.

“Nah. They just gon say it a waste of they valuable time. Know’m sayin?”

Mr. Singh considered Titus’s reflection in the rearview. Mr. Singh’s eyes in the mirror, in Julie’s opinion, were of a doleful beauty.

“I will try to catch up with them,” Mr. Singh said, putting the car in gear. “But I will not exceed the speed limit.”

“Yeah, okay,” Titus said. “Not too close, though.”

Mr. Singh looked disgusted. “Playing games,” he said.

Ghost Town, Dogtown, Jingletown, there were large swaths of Oakland all but unknown to Julie, among them that ragged old ill-used selvage between the bay and the tangles of the 880 and 980: abandoned army bases and naval stations, depopulated blocks where everything seemed to have been flattened by some economic meteor impact, tattered wetlands ribboned with egret. And, of course, the string of loading cranes massed along the westernmost edge of town, the 1st Oakland Cavalry readying a charge on San Francisco, shipping containers stacked around their feet, like bales of hay by giant quartermasters, to fuel the final assault. The container boxes of the port of Oakland, as seen from the Bay Bridge, were a lifelong source of fascination to Julie, monster piles of colored brick like stabs at some ambitious Lego project left unfinished, interchangeable as casino chips and yet each filled potentially with something new and surprising, soccer balls, polyurethane replicas of sushi, blue lasers, Santa hats, twenty-pound bags of chicharrones. In theory they were in constant motion, imports, exports, transshipments caught, swung, and dangled over the beds of trains and eighteen-wheelers and over the decks of the dull ships that brought and carried them away. Julie could never seem to catch the cranes in motion, and the loose but tidy piles of containers never seemed to move, as if the business of the port were a magical one like that of the toys in Toy Story, a secret work that would be spoiled if he observed it.

“You see those?” said Mr. Singh as they followed the Toronado down a broad avenue that cut across the former site, according to a historical marker at the old entry gate (tagged with an orc-ish graffiti rune), of the Oakland Naval Depot. Immense railway buildings of concrete and gray stucco awaited damnation on the east side of the avenue. Along the harbor side, a fence of steel unscrolled in woven sheets, topped with razor wire, beyond which the steel cavalry readied its attack. “The big metal things, some people say they are looking like horses?”

“George Lucas,” Julie predicted under his breath. “AT-ATs.”

“You know in Star Wars?” Mr. Singh said. “Those big walking things. Big walking robots.”

“AT-ATs,” Julie said. “In the snow.” He knew that his father, were he present, would feel compelled to point out that this was an urban myth of the East Bay, like the claim that the name itself had been bestowed upon the region by a pioneering coven of Satanists who spoke pig latin. It was very difficult for Julie, committed as he was to being like his father in no respect or particular, to resist the temptation to correct Mr. Singh.

Titus didn’t say anything. He just kept watching the back of the Toronado, the same way he watched the back of Valletta Moore’s head on the bus.

“Exactly! And there! Look at them! You see? George Lucas used very often to drive, you know, back and forth across the Bay Bridge, from what I have been told, he came originally from Stockton or Fresno.”

“Modesto,” Julie said.

“Modesto, still worse. Driving up to San Francisco as a young man to drink espresso coffee and experience French cinema, then returning in the small hours of the night to Modesto, which is a real armpit, I am attesting personally to that. And this, you see, was the inspiration for the AT-AT walking machines of the Star Wars films.”

“Cool,” Titus said, taking his eyes off the Toronado long enough to relive those giant legs astride the ice of Hoth, those darting starfighters trailing cable from their spinnerets. “Hold, hold up.”

They had come to a stretch of old rail yard where the buildings had been maintained and even renewed. In the trackless void of concrete, a number of metal sheds and depots huddled together around one immense train barn, like a feudal stronghold. A totem pole of signs advertised the services of welders, makers of specialty furniture, tool cutters, fiberglass fabricators and, at the foot of the pole, Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs. As the Toronado rolled, popping gravel, into the commons and slowed, its fits and spasms increased. It executed a kind of drunken rumba toward one of three open bay doors in the front of Motor City Auto Body, heaved itself halfway into the bay, and then, with one final shake of its castanets, died. The Toronado’s driver got out, and the shadow of Valletta Moore slid across the front bench to take the wheel.

He wore a Raiders jersey, number 78 with the name SHELL across the shoulders. Kung fu pants, some kind of sandals or leather flip-flops. He was carrying a long billy club, a kung fu bo—no, it was a walking stick—twirling it like an old-school beat cop.

“Okay. I am now leaving,” Mr. Singh announced as Stallings emerged from the car swinging his truncheon thing. “And I am taking you with me, no charge.”

Stallings did not look in their direction or appear to notice the taxicab at all. He came around the back of the spavined Toronado and studied its trunk for an instant. Then he raised the walking stick, reared back on his long scarecrow shanks, and gently thrust the stick against the circular keyhole in the lid of the trunk. He bent one knee, gave his wrist a twist, and either by means of qi or pure panache—should there prove any difference—gave the Toronado a baby push. It rocked back, then surged forward and rolled the rest of the way into the body shop. With Blofeldian alacrity, a steel door rolled down behind it. Luther Stallings stood studying the sealed steel door as though it allegorized something. Then he whipped around and pointed the end of his cane at the Crown Victoria.

“Ho, shit,” Titus said.

Mr. Singh and Julie came to rapid agreement on the advisability of their turning around now and driving as far as Mr. Singh felt twenty-one dollars would go.

Before Mr. Singh could put the car in drive, Titus got out. He took from his shirt pocket a small number of bills folded tight with origami precision. It might have been a packet containing some kind of sterilized pad. He unpleated a twenty and handed it, halfway to a peace crane, to Mr. Singh. “I got this,” he said.

Julie climbed out of the taxi. Titus had never paid for anything before.

“Here is my card,” Mr. Singh said, passing an oblong imprinted with his name, his contact information, and the surprising avocation of PUNJABI CHEF.

“Okay,” Julie said, too awed or afraid or embarrassed to mention that while he traveled with a portable eight-track player, he did not own a cell phone. “Thanks.”

He reached into his Johnny Depp wallet and pulled out one of his business cards at random and had already handed it to Mr. Singh before he noticed it was the one that read:

This was a word he had encountered in the pornographic Victorian novels kept by his mother in a shoebox in her closet, among the ordinary shoeboxes. It was less pragmatic though no less hopeful a declaration of calling than Mr. Singh’s. The Punjabi chef eyed the card, then glanced over at Luther Stallings. Leaning on the cane, Stallings had begun slowly to walk in the general direction, without any set goal, of Titus. Mr. Singh’s mustache did a slow hula over his pursed lips as he contemplated Julie’s card. Then, with a number of backward looks, Mr. Singh turned his taxicab around and drove away.

The libertine without portfolio came up alongside his friend, who had fallen, perhaps helplessly, into an arrant imitation of his grandfather’s trademark gait, intensified by whatever injury or infirmity required the use of a cane, so accurate it verged on mockery. Stallings angled his head to one side, sizing Titus up; Titus hitched his to the same inquisitive angle. Neither of them appeared to notice that Titus was running a Harpo Marx on Stallings.

“Huh,” Stallings said, and Titus duly said, “Huh.”

Stallings’s hair was densely threaded with ashy gray. There was a good deal less flesh on him than in his heyday. His teeth had not done well; some were lost. Otherwise he seemed okay, not obviously fucked up or sick, and if he was not looking quite so fine as his former costar, he was in far better shape than his Oldsmobile; a state fairly close, all in all, to the original, right down to the chill twinkle in the conman eye. The shoes on his sockless feet were not sandals, Julie saw, or flip-flops, but Chinese cloth slippers, the kind sold out of tubs in Chinatown for five dollars a pair. The kung fu pants had the sheen of doll pajamas or a cheap Halloween costume. Without taking his eyes off Titus, he raised the outstretched walking stick. Leveled it, in a broad sweep, at Julie, the tip of it unwavering, locked as though dowsing at Julie’s soul, a move right out of Witchfinder General. Julie found himself blushing deeply, as if his pockets held henbane and mandragora.

“Who’s the white boy?” Stallings asked Titus.

Julie did not catch the reply, it was tendered so softly.

“It’s who?” Stallings said. Not angry, not impatient, not unwilling yet to suffer fools or boys who muttered, but ready to go in any of these directions if need be.

“My friend,” Titus said loudly, ashamed.

Stallings lowered the cane and checked Julie out, once vertically, once horizontally, the process leaving him unconvinced if not outright skeptical. “Your ‘friend,’” he said, as if Titus had claimed that Julie was his invisible potato or his talking blue ankylosaurus.

“What they want?”

Valletta Moore stood in the second garage bay. She had her hand tucked inside her red handbag.

“Archy’s my father,” Titus said.

“Archy Stallings?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For real? You my grandson?”

Titus nodded.

“Boy got kids all over town,” Valletta said.

Luther came in a hurry, with a destination. Titus went stiffly into his grandfather’s arms. Holding back. But he went. Luther Stallings—at one time, many, many years earlier, a viable pretender to the fiercely disputed title of Toughest Black Man in the World—brushed away a few ill-suited tears.

“Well, goddamn.”

He let go of Titus, stepped away, and cleared his throat. He took hold of the silver-tipped head of his cane with both hands and planted it square on the ground in front of him. Looked down the avenue across the barren expanse of the old depot, then up the other way where there was not much to see, at first glance, but razor wire and morning glory in wild contention. And sky. Lots of sky, torn into scraps of silver and blue. Eighteen-wheelers like beads on an endless strand, creeping along the flyovers toward the docks. And containers stacked everywhere you looked, painted with names that sounded to Julie like the names of opponents in Street Fighter: “K” Line, Yang Ming, Maersk, Star. Beyond that the gray planes and facets of San Francisco.

“Best get inside,” Luther said.

Titus started toward the garage. Stallings turned to Julie, who hesitated, paralyzed by a ridiculous fear that Valletta Moore might be keeping a gun in her handbag. Afraid, too, of the man with the cane, of this nether zone of Oakland, of certain shadows in the garage that he saw gathering into the shape of man, large and portly, with fearsome mustaches somewhere between biker king and generalissimo.

“What?” Luther Stallings said to Julie. “You want a hug, too?”

“Okay,” said Julie. Then he realized that Luther Stallings had only been joking, and even before the man turned and loped, without looking back, into the garage bay of Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs, he felt sharply bereft.

“Oh, look at that cute little boy,” Aviva said bitterly. Frog Park, lunchtime, babies and herders of babies pastured in the sunshine. The boy was as strawberry blond as Julie had been once. He lounged against his mother with his toddler overalls unsnapped and flapping, feeding her a garbanzo bean. “Could you die?”

The boy looked nothing like Julie had looked, apart from the hair. It was the angle of his slouch, the way he carelessly depended on his mother to hold him up, that killed her. Or maybe it was simply the avalanche of years. She looked away. She almost regretted having proposed to Nat that instead of eating at the store, they find someplace nice to sit and have an early lunch together. A bag of sandwiches from Genova Deli, some fried artichokes, a pair of Aranciatas. Her last meal, she had styled it, aiming for wry, hitting brittle. Taken aback when Nat only assented to her terminology, hunched over the counter of Brokeland, chin in hand, flying black sails from every mast like the ship in Greek mythology. Sailing as ever toward her, from yet another labyrinth, aboard the Moody Dude. No sign of Archy. Explanation of that absence, of what was wrong around or between the partners, awaited only a formal request from Aviva; but she had withheld it. For once, let Nat do the listening. Let him look for something to grab on to, someplace to hunker down and watch as she unstoppered a genie of panic and did whatever it was that you called the opposite of wishing.

“If I go to prison,” she said.

“Ho, boy,” Nat said, fishing Möbius strips of onion out of his sandwich with a feline prissiness, piling them on the white sandwich wrapper spread between them on the bench. “Here we go.”

“You’re going to have to make Julie come visit me.”

“Aviva.”

“He won’t want to come,” Aviva said. “He’ll be too angry.”

“You aren’t going to prison.”

“Oh, no?”

The boy reclined against his mother the way a god might recline in an Italian fresco, against a favorite cloud, in the heaven of his mother and her bare brown shoulder. Maybe around his eyes, too, there was a touch of Julie, a histamine puffiness in the cheeks.

“Aviva, it’s a hearing in a hospital. Not a courtroom trial. And it’s about something that Gwen did. You’re just along for the ride.”

“Gwen didn’t do anything, Nat.”

“No, of course, I’m just saying—”

“That’s the point. Gwen’s real mistake wasn’t mouthing off to a doc. I mean, it was a mistake. But she was tired. She was drained. It was a really long day. And the guy totally, totally provoked her.”

“Had to be,” Nat said. “Gwen Shanks losing her cool is kind of hard to imagine.”

“It was unreal. Impressive.” Delicious, sickening, like eating an entire birthday cake between them. Aviva had found herself reveling in Gwen’s outburst with all the horror of fifteen years spent putting up with the highhandedness and disdain of doctors, dusting it like dander from her shoulders. Fifteen years of valorous discretion, unspoken retorts, and trepverter. “But a mistake.”

“It’s always a mistake to lose control like that,” Nat said without apparent self-irony.

“Huh,” Aviva said.

“Shut up.”

“Anyway. This fucked-up hearing we have to endure today? It’s not happening because Gwen lost her shit in the ER. And Gwen’s blowup won’t be the reason when I have to go to prison.”

“Good to know.”

“Gwen thinks Lazar disrespected her because she’s black. And look, I mean you’re aware of my policy when it comes to that type of situation.”

“Your policy is ‘What do I know about being black?’”

“What do I know about being black? I’m sure that when she went after him, calling him names, pointing her finger at him? To Lazar, it was just another stereotype from the ER deck of cards, you know, the Angry Black Woman. But being a black woman wasn’t Gwen’s big mistake, either. Her big mistake was being a midwife. A nurse-midwife who does home births and hospital births.”

“They hate that.”

“They hate all midwives, but they especially hate the ones who do home births. They want to make us go away. They want to say to us, ‘Pick. You can do births here in the hospital, or you can do them at home with your patchouli, and your placenta-eating, and your mandala tramp stamps. But if you choose to keep doing those home births, ladies? Then you lose your privileges.’”

She became aware that some of the women around them, moms, babysitters, were looking to see who was ranting on this fine August afternoon at some poor old slumped guy in a pool-hall suit, picking at a sandwich. At least one of the moms was a patient of the Birth Partners, Dina or Deanna, looking half embarrassed and half entranced, the way you looked at your rabbi when you saw him mowing his lawn in a pair of Bermuda shorts.

“I mean,” Aviva said, lowering her voice, “we know this. This is a proven, established fact. Every other hospital in the East Bay has already done it. Chimes is the last one that still lets midwives do both home and hospital births. They’re just looking for an excuse to go the same direction. And, of course, they have all the power, right?”

“Right.”

“Meanwhile, if they have a birth that goes like Lydia’s? It’s ‘Oh, hey, shit happens. Mom’s fine, baby’s fine, let’s move on.’ I don’t know, maybe if Gwen didn’t lose her temper, maybe we would have been able to skate past. But Gwen did lose her temper, and when it came time to say she was sorry for losing her temper, God bless her, she didn’t want to do that. So now? Today, at this hearing?”

“What happens?”

“I figure we’ll get our privileges suspended. A month, two months. Six months. Just to give us something to think about. And then two or six months from now, they’ll make it a condition of our reinstatement that we stop doing home births. Then once they’ve got me, they’ll make all the other midwives stop, too. And here’s the thing, Nat.”

She put down her sandwich, wiped her fingers, took a long acrid swallow of orange soda. The little boy had wandered away from his mother, tacking across the grass toward the play structure. His mother watched him go, proud, tickled, unaware that every time they toddled away from you, they came back a little different, ten seconds older and nearer to the day when they left you for good. Pearl divers in training, staying under a few seconds longer every time.

“I’m not going to stop,” Aviva said. “I will tell them I’m stopping, and then I will continue to do home births in secret. I’ll do them in yurts and tree forts, in Section Eight housing, on top of Grizzly Peak in some million-dollar glass palace, you can see the Dumbarton Bridge. And then one day, sooner or later, something will go wrong. I’ll have to transfer to the hospital. And the secret will get out. My privileges will be terminated. I’ll be investigated, and brought up for review, and after dragging the process out until our family is broke and in debt for all kinds of legal fees, the state medical board will take away my license.”

She knew a strange sense of exhilaration and saw it reflected in her husband’s face, a question forming in his eyes, probably something along the lines of Is this what I’m like?

“And after they take away my license, Nat, I promise you: I will still do home births. I will do them for people who live off the grid. Marginals. Illegals. People, I don’t know, moms on the run from the law. Moms in cults, moms living in communes. Whatever insane, highly inadvisable scenario you want to imagine where somebody would hire a rogue midwife. Because babies should be born at home, and midwives should catch them. That is the sum total of my system of belief, all right? It may seem trivial or quaint or crazy to you—”

“When did I ever—”

“—but I want you, okay, to take a minute—or, honestly, given the fact that we have been married for seventeen years, take two seconds and ask yourself if I would be willing to go to prison for that simple belief.”

“No need to ask,” Nat said. “I’m going to start stocking up on files for the cakes.”

She smiled and punched him on the shoulder, hard, not without affection.

“Ow.”

“Asshole.”

The genie had drained, a dark smoky funnel, back down into the mouth of its flask. She tamped the stopper and dropped the bottle into some deep irretrievable abyss where it belonged.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to vent.”

“I get it.”

“I had to say it to somebody.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” he said.

“That’s your job.”

“Great,” he said. “Pretty soon I’ll be able to go full-time.”

For the first time she caught the note of sorrow in his voice, something catching at the back of his throat.

“Hey,” she said. “Honey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just a fucking record store.”

“This is sacred ground,” the old man was saying, or words to that effect. Titus, to be honest, was only half listening, or put it this way: He was listening as hard as he could but to a different story. A bigger story, The Titus Joyner Story as it culminated, for now at least, here. Here in the fluorescent chill of this funky old lost-Atlantis grotto of a body shop, Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs having turned out to be a cabinet of wonders, the final resting place of Inca submarines and Nazi saucers and the death-ray cannons of ancient Egypt. Here where, from steel hooks along two of the cinder-block walls, there hung the bones, hides, and organs of legendary whips—grilles, slabs, chrome intricacies looted or preserved from dozens of monstrous automobiles. Here where, beside the long wall opposite the rolling steel doors, a Smithsonian of parts and hardware stood racked and labeled in bins, baskets, and pin drawers. Here. Now. Hiding out in the shadow of the AT-ATs on the ice world of Hoth. Co-conspiring in the secret lair of Cleon Strutter and Candygirl Clark to hit the vaults of his impregnable self and rob them of the treasure that he had been guarding for so long. With the whole of that guarded and time-locked heart, then, Titus was listening. Not to the science that Luther Stallings was dropping but to the mysterious story of his own life from this moment forward, a tangled tale of which the old man’s rambling lecture formed a mere strand in the overall weave. “Holy ground. Oakland, California. End of the dream. End of the motherfucking line.”

“But not the end of the lecture,” said Valletta Moore, and under her breath, almost but not quite below the human hearing frequency, “Apparently.”

She perched on a bar stool, hunched like a jeweler over an upturned steel drum that was covered in a cut sheet of glitter-flecked upholstery vinyl, in the “office” that had been carved out of the back corner of the echoey cinder-block barn by means of two grease-furred sofas, a wooden rolltop desk, and a filing cabinet, under a poster of a mad orange hot-rod pickup truck advertising something called the House of Kolor. Valletta had a white earbud tucked into the ear that was farthest from Luther, and the near one dangled as she leaned to study the little tools and bottles spread across the glittery tablecloth: Everything she needed to execute custom work on her fingernails. From time to time she lowered a pair of half-glasses from her forehead to the bridge of her nose but refused to keep them there for longer than a few seconds at a time. A veddy-dry British man droned from the speaker of the neglected earbud, narrating all about The Autobiography of Miss Jane Marple or some such shit. The submarine cave of Valletta Moore’s cleavage, glimpsed through the open collar of her shirt, a further, smaller Atlantis lost in freckles and rumors of cranberry lace, formed another vivid tangle in the tale of Titus Joyner.

“Man has a audience,” said the old roly-poly Mexican or Spaniard or whatever he was. Owner of the place, Sixto Cantor. Mustached face made out of orange rocks seamed together like the Thing in the Fantastic Four, slung wide as the cars by which he got his living, thick white hair streamlined back into a swan, the fin on some heap of the Fonzie years. Across the name patch of his blue coverall, it said EDDIE in red script. Behind the prescription lenses of black safety glasses with cheese-grater sides, Eddie’s eyes patrolled like fighting fish in a tank. At least one of those eyes, at any given moment, was on the crew of six over in the first bay, three Latinos, two black guys, and a little punk-rock body-art dude, who were busy gutting some gray eighties box, maybe a Citation. Just feeding on the thing like a swarm of piranhas. “We gonna be here all night.”

“Yeah, well, I’m talking about the nighttime,” the old man said. “So that’s okay. ‘History is made at night,’ Henry Ford said that. That is what they mean when they talk about the American Dream.”

While he professed, Luther Stallings lay on the floor on his back, stripped to his white kung fu pajama pants, balanced at the tailbone on a foam rubber mat, snapping off stomach crunches by the hundred. Bicycle crunches, twisting crunches, rope climbs, the steady scissoring pulse of it marking the progress of a lecture interrupted only by an occasional wince as his hip bone cracked or by the odd snort of impatience from Valletta Moore. Every time Titus glanced over at Julie, boy was watching the ripple and swell of the old man’s abdominals, the play underneath that leather stitched tight as the rolls in a bucket seat. Julie looking half queasy, half hypnotized, as if watching a sneaker go around inside a clothes dryer. “Everything got started for us, minute the white man wanted to get some sleep on a train.”

The discourse had been riding this particular local for most of the past fifteen, twenty minutes, The Secret History of the Black Man in California According to Luther Stallings, the old man backing up his claims with cites and quotes drawn from irrefutable authorities whose names always seemed to be on the verge of being divulged or else, when spoken aloud, meant nothing to Titus. Claim Number One, front and center, being something along the lines of how, when you tunneled deep, the way the old man had done during the long years of his exile, going way on down into the mines of knowledge, Oakland was literally the Land of Dreams. After that, well, between the growling and barking of the air compressor, the ceaselessness of the trash being talked by the Motor City crew, the sight of what appeared to be the right (i.e., Robin-side) door of the Batmobile from the old-school TV show hanging hooked like a side of beef in the far corner of the garage, and the undersea world whose gates parted every time Valletta Moore bent over to French the tip of another fingernail, frankly, Titus did not follow it too closely, though he understood and even felt prepared to endorse the view that the Secret History of the Black Man in California truly was all tied up with the sleep and sleeplessness, the insomnia and dreams of the white man. Because, because, hmm, something about how white folks back in the day, needing to catch their beauty sleep as they traveled west subjugating and conquering, turned to a man named Pullman. And this one white dude, Joe, no, George Pullman, turned right around and, not out of any kind of wanting to do the right thing but only because he was cheap and needed an instant pool of skilled but low-pay servants, started hiring up free black men of the time and setting them to work tending to the slumber of white people. Punctuated by grunts that at times seemed to elide or bleep out the parts of what he was saying that would help it make some kind of sense, the old man evoked the nightly scene, vigilant black men studying the sonorous nocturnal rumblings of wealthy sleepers in the sleeper cars, dreamers rocking through the great western darkness toward the land of sunset, the far shore of the American Dream, which for reasons no doubt made clear during a particularly loud grunt, was all because the word “America” was actually a broken-down version of “Amenthe-Ra,” the Land of the West in Ancient Egypt, where you went when you died, though not in a train, of course, but in a boat, a westbound boat like those that had freighted the sorrows of the Pullman porters’ African ancestors, even though to the ancient Egyptians, the death journey to Amenthe-Ra was only a kind of sleep, in fact a dream—not Dream as in “I Have a Dream” but, rather, the strange journey taken every night by the sleeping human brain, although, as an aside, the connections were interesting, you had to wonder why Dr. King, whose father was a Prince Hall Mason, had chosen to couch his message using a term so central to the Secret History of Black Men in California, the language of the Pullman porter, raised up and set to rights and liberated while the white man was literally asleep.

“The freest black men that ever lived,” Luther Stallings told the boys, “but it was like a kind of secret freedom.”

He described the Pullman porters in terms that conjured up giant sleek-haired warriors of the night, armored in smiles, how they went from place to place, all these little backwoods, boondocks towns, seeing the world, carrying like undercover spies, hidden about their persons, all the news of the clandestine world of black America, the latest records, gossip, magazines, hairstyles, spreading the lore and the styles across the country, to every place where black people lived, and most of all singing the song of California, to be specific the city of Oakland, where Pullman porters got off the trains to rest on their sunset couches in the houses they bought with the money they wrestled loose from Mr. George Pullman, houses in which they built up families that sent children and grandchildren to college and trade school and eventually to the United States Congress, then getting back onto the trains in the morning to ride south and east, spreading the news of their own prosperity, so that by the time World War II blew up, Oakland was the Hollywood of middle-class black aspiration, except that unlike in Hollywood, once you got to Oakland, you actually stood a chance of making good.

“Hollywood,” Titus said, feeling like he was expected to say something. “Well, all right.”

The Secret History came off kind of boring in its particulars, truthfully, built on events and details and historical phenomena whose obscurity to Titus only deepened as his grandfather strung them together: strikes and black labor unions, bourgeoisie and Seventh Street nightclubs, shipyards, the Klan marching down Broadway in broad daylight as white Oakland lined the streets cheering, and yet the arc of the narrative, the sense of sweep across time and territory, stirred, in Titus’s mind, a sense of revelation.

“That was the real underground railroad, a railroad underneath, inside another railroad. And this here was the terminus. This building you in, it was a train barn. You see that line there in the cement, crack like a big circle going all the way around? That’s where the turntable is. Big old concrete turntable, spinning the music of dreams.”

The old man seemed to have concluded his remarks. He sat up, winded, shining from his hairline to his shins.

“Only it don’t turn no more,” Eddie said.

Luther Stallings looked from Titus to Julie and back, wanting to know what they thought, how they were handling it, what they were going to do with their little minds now that they had been blown.

Julie glanced at Eddie. “Is that from the real Batmobile?” he said.

Valletta Moore said, “Huh.” She shook her head. “Luther, they are not listening to you.” She was tucking little foam spacers between the fingers of her left hand. “Nobody is listening to you.”

“Man should have got a Oscar,” Eddie said. “Always playing the silent type.”

He and Valletta Moore fell out laughing.

“I’m listening,” Titus said, trying not to sound contradictory, since contradicting Valletta Moore was painful to him and, in the movies of hers that he had seen, occasionally dangerous.

“All right,” Luther said, firing off a scowl at his old lady, then giving Eddie the other barrel, mopping his face with a ragged but clean square of polishing cloth. “There you go. Now,” he told Titus, “boy, what you got to do, if you want to absorb knowledge, you have to ask questions. So go on. Go ahead.”

Titus understood that he was meant to build off the lecture just completed, but that understanding was unable to outrun the natural impulse of his true curiosity. He knew he should ask a question about Egyptian funeral traditions and Prince Hall Freemasons, but to his dismay, he heard himself saying, “Why you have to live in a garage?”

Another laugh arose irresistibly from the neighborhood of Eddie Cantor, a repressed, apologetic series of semi-coughs. This time Valletta Moore contented herself with studying her own reflection in the clear-coat shimmer of her left index fingernail and muttering a few words to herself in a parody of a stage whisper, hard to make out, something along the lines of Oh, now, I want to hear this.

The old man sat, long arms hugging knees to chest. He pursed his lips and gave his head a slight shake, leading with his jaw. Closed his eyes, opened them again. For what felt like a long time, he said nothing. Titus began to regret the question, particularly when he saw a brief upwelling in the old man’s eyes, though it passed without a tear having been permitted to fall. Titus was on the verge of withdrawing the question and shifting about for a replacement when his grandfather said, “I did some stupid shit in my life. That is the truth.”

Titus glanced at Julie, whose face grew solemn and knowing, a touch pious. “Drugs,” Julie said.

“Even stupider shit than drugs,” the old man said. “And that’s saying a lot, y’all can take my word. But I’m clean and sober, thirteen months, one week, and two days. I have my shit together. I officially have a movie in the active stages of preproduction—”

Valletta Moore pronounced another observation whose syllables hovered just that side of audible. She was like the magic harp from that Disney movie The Black Cauldron, popping a string every time the harp-playing dude, the bard, came up with some new exaggeration of his exploits or abilities.

“Strutter 3?” Titus said.

“You guessed it. But uh, something of that nature, independent type of venture, operating on the kind of small nonstudio level that Stallings Productions operating at, you have to, look here, sometimes you need to get a little creative in your financing. That’s why, to try to answer your question, wasn’t exactly the question I was expecting, but uh, I came up with a way to, uh, make one of those stupid things I did a long time ago, way to turn it around a little bit. Hook up to a major player in the industry.”

“Or so you thought,” said Valletta Moore.

“Goddammit, Valletta—”

“Thinking you could shake down that—”

The old man was up and on his feet like an umbrella opening. In the passage of another half second, he had organized his arms and legs according to a logic more direct than whatever had guided his verbal teaching. There was an impression of wind and gyration contained within a modest ambit, like the procedures of the Tasmanian Devil in cartoons, and then, as with the push given to the back of the Toronado by the tip of his walking stick, it all came down to the point of his left foot, one square inch of contact. The steel drum pitched over, resounding against the cement floor with a Chinese-gong finality. All of Valletta’s little bottles and implements went flying. Over in the bay, the hydraulic pump cut off with a gasp.

“Uh?” Julie said to Valletta Moore. “You okay?”

They were the first words he had directed toward her since the minute they walked into the garage.

“Oh, I’m fine, honey,” Valletta said, all cheerful. She crept around on her hands and knees, trying to put things right, checking bottles for cracks and spills. “Thank you.”

“Well, I better go check on those yo-yos,” Eddie said.

The fighting fish flitted back and forth behind the panes of their aquarium as Eddie surveyed the mess he had permitted in his otherwise spotless body shop, looking like his reasons for having permitted it were no longer apparent to him. Figure his eyes must be trained by now to gauge possibilities for recovery, salvation, hidden in the ruin of a once fine machine. Titus tried to read those eyes for signs of hope, but Eddie was looking at him; Julie; him.

“You boys need a ride anywheres?”

“Uh, well—”

Julie got to his feet, hugging himself, used to hanging with the kind of people who talked it out, shared their feelings, everybody circling up like Care Bears for a big hug when it was through, nobody kicking shit over, spattering the walls and floor with bloody nail polish.

Luther Stallings reached for his walking stick and leaned on it with both hands, watching his grandson but not giving any indication of what he wanted Titus to do or to say.

“We’re fine,” Titus said.

Eddie nodded and, yelling in a contemptuous dialect of Spanglish, went over to critique the efforts of his crew. Luther’s stick banged against the concrete floor as he padded in his Bruce Lee slippers across the stained seas and continents that mapped it, toward the Toronado in the nearest bay. He reached in through the driver’s window to take the keys from the ignition, then went around to the back and popped the trunk. He took a plastic bin with two lids that interfolded out of the trunk, huffed it over to one of the workbenches. He looked at Titus.

“Thought your ass wanted to see my movie,” he said.

She would do what she had to do; staying fly, alas, might not be an option. It implied the sustainment of a metaphysical state from which Gwen, a house on a rain-swollen hillside, had long since slid. But she gave it her best shot, determined to quit sneaking around, put an end to the hiding, all the craven marital and professional ninjutsu. To come on as straight and strong and brazen as Candygirl Clark, unreachable as that aspiration might remain to a woman in her thirty-seventh week who had spent the past three days with a suitcase for a wardrobe and a foam pad for a bed.

With three hours to go before the showdown at Chimes, Gwen drove through the tunnel to the Land of the White People. Her BMW faded incrementally into the local autosphere as the freeway stretched and flexed for its run toward the Sierra foothills. Shadows sharpened, and the afternoon took on a desert shimmer. Sprinklers chittered. Titleists traced white rainbows against the blue Contra Costa sky. Along the forearms of hard-shopping women in tennis skirts, sunshine lit the golden down.

At A Pea in the Pod, Gwen consigned her cubiformity to a simple A-line dress of stretchy gray jersey with a matching gray blazer. The jacket came with shoulder pads that lent her an uncomfortable resemblance to the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. Because it rode up so high on her belly, the dress appeared to hang down at the back a good three or four inches in a kind of impromptu train. She would spend the rest of the day tugging her dress down at the front like a half-bold teenage girl in a micromini.

Up at the cash register, she asked for a pair of scissors to cut out the shoulder pads, which, given the shock on the face of the downy golden salesgirl as Gwen vandalized a dress on which she had dropped $175, felt like kind of a kick-ass thing to do. Then it was on to the Easy Spirit store, where, employing a pair of vanadium tongs and a portable blast shield, she consigned her depleted espadrilles to a trained hazmat team and walked out in a stolid gray pair of modified Mary Janes. They had the charm of cement and the elegance of cinderblocks, but they held her feet without pain or structural failure, and it seemed to her that the librarian-nun vibe they exuded was also not incompatible with the kicking of ass.

Thus equipped, she returned through the Caldecott Transdimensional Portal to Oakland, to submit her hair to the subtle if not silent artistry of Tyneece Fuqua at Glama. To meet Gwen’s hair emergency, Tyneece had been obliged—she explained in irritable detail—to reschedule a telephone consultation with a psychic in Makawao, Hawaii, a woman who, during their prior phone session, had come close to locating the two bars of looted Reich gold that Tyneece’s great-grandfather had brought home from the war and buried, it was said, in one of three backyards belonging to three different Oakland women who were the mothers of his nineteen children. While she lectured Gwen on the intricacies of Nazi gold registration numbers and of her abundant and goldless cousinage, Tyneece serviced Gwen’s worn-out locks, picking out slackers, stragglers, and lost souls, then twisting them tight, as if winding the very mainsprings of Gwen’s resolve. She massaged Gwen’s scalp, neck, and shoulders and put the new girl on Gwen’s sore feet. Finally, having done what she could, she called in Mr. Robert, whom she had sent for as soon as she learned what Gwen was up against today.

Mr. Robert came in wheeling a scuffed pink plastic art box on an airline-stewardess luggage trolley. He was a dapper little gentleman in green plaid pants, a short-sleeve lime turtleneck, and zip-up white ankle boots, with Sammy Davis hair. Nowadays he mostly worked weddings, proms, and the odd quinceañera, but at one time he had been the go-to Hollywood black makeup man, relied upon by an entire vanished generation of television actresses, from Diahann Carroll to Roxie Roker, to combat the visual and technical biases of white cameramen and lighting directors. After a few seconds of intense scrutiny, Mr. Robert shrugged and looked confused.

“I heard this was supposed to be an emergency,” he said. “But honey, you’re so hot, I’m afraid you going to set fire to my cotton balls.”

“Now, don’t lie to me, Mr. Robert.”

“I’m serious! You’re radiant! I need a Geiger counter! I need to get me one of those lead suits like Homer Simpson wears.”

Mr. Robert was a scabrous if outdated gossip with a brusque, pointillist touch and a habit of asking questions without waiting for answers. When he had finished, he took hold of her chin in his slim, dry fingers and turned her head this way, that. One eyebrow lifted in a skeptical arch. Then he let Gwen get a gander at herself in the mirrored wall of the salon.

“I almost look beautiful,” she told his reflection.

“Almost?” his reflection said, looking hurt. “Honey, fuck that, Mr. Robert doesn’t leave no one looking almost.”

“No, you’re right, thank you, Mr. Robert,” she said quickly, as he began with an angry clatter to return his brushes and bottles to the pink tackle box. “I look fly.”

He didn’t say anything, but she caught the shrug of the left wing of his mustache, a half-satisfied half-smile. He packed up his gear, slow and deliberate, from time to time rubbing the ache of age out of his fine brown long-fingered hands. Tyneece had already collected Gwen’s money for this emergency session, but when Mr. Robert looked up from his kit, Gwen was holding out a twenty-dollar tip. Mr. Robert shook his head and pushed away her proffering hand.

“Hit me next time,” he said.

“No, Mr. Robert—”

“I was born in my momma’s kitchen,” he said. “In Rosedale, Mississippi. Was a midwife like you brought me into this wonderful world.”

“Yeah, well,” Gwen said, touched, embarrassed, regretting, in spite of the progress it seemed to imply, the loss of the world of black midwives catching black children, grappling the future into the light one slick pair of little shoulders at a time. “After today I might not be a midwife too much longer.”

As appeared to be his habit—maybe Mr. Robert was a bit deaf—he ignored her. “Before she called my daddy in to see me for the first time,” he continued, “this lady, the midwife, she took a lipstick out her purse? And made up my momma’s mouth. She combed my momma’s hair. Fixed her up, you know? Got her ready. That was how my momma always told it, anyway. Sometimes I wonder, you know, hmm, was that, did that give me the idea,” hand on a hip, pointing with the other hand, the genie of himself addressing himself in far-off Rosedale long ago, “‘Mr. Robert, when you grow up, you going to be a makeup artist!’”

He hoisted his tackle box onto the wheeled trolley and bound it carelessly with loops of green bungee cord. “Do you think something like that,” he said, “something that happened in the room when you were born, you could notice it, and it would stay with you the rest of your life?”

“I wouldn’t put anything past a baby,” Gwen said.

At 2:55, her Chimes General parking ticket tucked carefully into a zip pocket inside her handbag, Gwen trundled through the high, wide sliding doors she had come through so many times before, having so much more at stake, those other late nights, long afternoons, and early mornings, than her own small, personal fate. The feeders and freshets of East Bay humanity flowed through the filter of the hospital lobby, all the wild variety of life in the local pond. A gang banger rolling toward the elevator with a bouquet of lilies and Gerber daisies stuffed under his arm, a sunburned old buzzard with a physicist shock of white hair and camp shorts, a one-legged, three-fingered bearded biker dude she figured for a lax diabetic being eaten by neuropathy, two new moms—one Asian, one veiled and tented in the laws of Islam—waiting in festive wheelchairs with their babies for their husbands to bring the cars around. Scrubs, coveralls, nightgowns, baller jerseys, and patterned hippie-chick skirts, a pair of Buddhist monks flying the saffron, probably Thais from over at the Russell Street Temple. At the sight of them, Gwen was rapt by a need for the little coconut-and-chive pancakes they served there Sunday mornings, but it was a Thursday, and anyway, Candygirl Clark never would have permitted a craving, even for Thai temple pancakes, to divert her from a mission.

“Wow,” Aviva said, taking in the fruit of Gwen’s resolve. Shoes, dress, jacket, the exuberant coils of her restored coiffure. “Don’t you clean up nice.”

Gwen gave a tug on the front hem of the dress.

Aviva was at her gravest, slim and efficacious in a taupe suit with a skirt that fell to just above her knees. Her hair, regularly—you might even have said carefully—threaded with gray, was pulled into a wide barrette of chased Mexican silver. No makeup at all apart from a touch of color on her lips, a shade or two more vivid than her own natural rose-pink. Rested and collected and projecting, Gwen thought, the slightest touch of resignation to her fate. Having given Gwen’s appearance a good going-over, she lingered on Gwen’s eyes, as if trying to discern in them some clue to her partner’s thinking or state of mind.

“You ready for this?” Aviva said.

“I am so ready for this,” Gwen said.

“Yeah?” Alerted, curious. “Know something I don’t?”

“Not so far,” Gwen said, sweet as pie. “But it’s only been ten years.”

“Huh,” Aviva said, bullshit sniffer set as ever to a brutally low ppm.

Gwen tried to go wide-eyed and innocent, feeling, of all things, strong and positive and—but for the lack of six little coconut milk pancakes, steaming and flecked with green onion, nestled in their paper cradle—surprisingly ready.

“I’m just going to try to, you know, maintain my dignity in this matter,” she said. “I don’t intend to embarrass myself ever again.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Aviva said. “ ’Kay, then. I guess we should probably head on up.”

Gwen checked her watch. “Let’s give him a minute.”

“Give who a minute?”

“Moby,” Gwen said, and then she saw the big man stutter-stepping leftward to avoid collision with an elderly black couple helping each other out the front door, a human lean-to, temporary shelter against the day.

She had called Moby right after the fateful shower, her last ever at the Bruce Lee Institute, during the course of which, caught in the brainstorm breeze of all those negatively charged ions, Gwen had found herself imbued with the spirit of Candygirl Clark.

“All your little self-deprecating pregnant-lady fat jokes to the side,” Moby had told her over the phone, “I really only represent whales.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Gwen had said. “But Chimes General doesn’t.”

“Did they suggest y’all bring a lawyer along?”

“No, on the contrary, technically, it’s just an informational thing. But that’s what makes it such a good idea. Look, Moby, you don’t even have to say anything. Just sit there with, like, your necktie, your briefcase, all big and intimidating like you are.”

“No shit. You think I look intimidating?”

“You definitely have the potential.”

“To be badass?”

“Like, a form of badass.”

“The intimidation fac-tah!”

“Sure.”

Admittedly, she felt a doubt then, hearing the eagerness kindle in Moby’s voice along with that horrible Electric Boogaloo accent, but today was not about doubt, second-guessing, hesitation. Today was about doing what one had to do while approximating, to the best of one’s own and Mr. Robert’s abilities, the condition of flyness.

And here the man showed up wearing brown Birkenstock sandals with his baggiest navy suit over black socks.

“Good Lord,” Aviva said.

“Whoa.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“I was trying for a certain intimidation factor,” Gwen said. “Frankly, I had not counted on the Birkenstocks.”

“Gwen!”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s fine?”

“He just needs to sit there. To be there, physically, taking up that much lawyer space in the room.”

“Okay,” Aviva said, meaning it was not okay. “I’m confused. When Garth Newgrange threatens us with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit that not only could put us out of business but also could leave us both totally fucking bankrupt, you won’t even talk to a lawyer.”

“Garth has no grounds for a suit. His baby was fine, Lydia was fine.”

“Then for this thing,” deaf as Mr. Robert when she needed to be, “you bring in a guy, the venue of his last trial was SeaWorld.”

“Ladies,” said Moby with the most terrible suavity imaginable. Gwen felt another tremor of uncertainty. On the way up in the elevator, however, Moby assumed a surprisingly professional demeanor, speaking low and fast, buoyant and aswim in his own expertise.

“I spoke to the general counsel,” he told the partners. “She said that even though a formal complaint has been brought, it’s not like it’s, you know, can’t be expunged. Written in stone. The board has discretion, and they have authority to toss the thing out as long as we can satisfy Lazar and give them a reason to let it drop. Maybe they keep you, Gwen, on probation for six months, a year. Then everything goes back to normal.”

“‘Give them a reason,’” Gwen said. “What kind of reason did legal affairs have in mind? How’m I supposed to ‘satisfy’ Lazar?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Gwen, you know what you have to do,” Aviva said.

“What?”

Aviva didn’t say anything, didn’t feel she needed to say anything, smug as ever in the telepathic power of her self-evident correctness. Gwen refused this time, knowing the secret word was “apologize,” but staring right back at Aviva as the elevator opened at the fourth floor for a ghost, closed, carried on.

“Apologize,” Aviva said at last, giving it a slight hint of the imperative.

“‘Apologize?’” Gwen feigned a degree of shock at the revelation. “To Lazar? For what?”

“For nothing. It’s a meaningless, empty formula: ‘I’m sorry.’ Literally? It means you are in pain, you are sore. But nobody knows that, and nobody means to say that. They’re just words, Gwen. It’s a token, a little box on somebody else’s checklist, you take your pencil and you go…” She ticked off a little checkmark in midair. “You just mouth the words, take your medicine, and we can all—”

“Take my medicine,” Gwen said, breaking out another package of ironizing quote marks, her supply maybe starting to run low. “Okay, sure, hey, they’re doctors, right? As long as they don’t try to administer it rectally—”

The doors opened on the sixth floor, and Gwen shut up. They briefly became quite lost, looking for the conference room, wandering through an intricacy of corridors and sub-lobbies until they ran into Lazar himself, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve, turning from a drinking fountain halfway along a blue-carpeted branch corridor behind Personnel. He was in a light blue button-down shirt with a square-tip knit necktie and a pair of blue twill trousers so tight that his bicyclist thighs hoisted the cuffs to floodwater levels.

“I’m sorry it got this far,” Aviva told him.

“I’m sure you are,” he said, pointedly avoiding eye contact with Gwen. He opened the door to the conference room and stood aside to let them pass.

As they made the introductions, Gwen saw that she had lucked out: the midwifery review board as currently constituted was three OBs, all of them men. She knew and had worked with all three over the years, and her relations with them, like Aviva’s, were in each case at least cordial and, in the case of Dr. Bernstein, who was chairing the proceedings, warm. Bernstein had referred dozens of patients to Birth Partners, and Gwen at various times had formed the distinct impression that old Aryeh Bernstein was macking, in that pass-the-time doctorly way, on Aviva. But none of that formed the basis of Gwen’s luck.

3 WHITE MALE OBS, Aviva wrote on the topmost sheet of one of the legal pads that the hospital stenographer had distributed to the partners when they sat down. VS. 1 BLACK MIDWIFE = TOTALLY FAIR.

“Totally,” Gwen said aloud, though she wasn’t entirely sure where to place Dr. Soleymanzadeh on the whiteness scale.

The stenographer, a formidable older Filipina who was also tape-recording the proceedings, frowned, then typed seven letters into the transcript. Bernstein started, caught off guard by the tap of the keys, obviously fearing maybe that things were starting without him.

“Okay, then,” he said, with a nod to Soleymanzadeh and Leery on his left and right. “Ms. Jaffe, Ms. Shanks. Gwen, Aviva. As you know, we’re here today to follow up on a complaint filed by Dr. Lazar, here, Paul Lazar, following from an incident that occurred in the ER back on the twentieth. At this point, the hearing is purely for the purpose of gathering information, trying to fill out a more complete picture of what transpired, which Doctors Soleymanzadeh, Leery, and I will use to come to some kind of recommendation about the status of your privileges here at Chimes General. Now, this is a serious complaint, and there’s no question it’s an important matter. Also, I should probably mention that whatever our recommendation should be, that is likely to become the action taken by the hospital. But—”

“Or not taken,” Moby said as if helpfully.

“But,” Bernstein resumed, “I’d like to begin by reminding you, Gwen, Aviva, that this hearing falls strictly within the purview of hospital and departmental policy regarding the conduct and status of nurse-midwives with privileges at Chimes. It is emphatically not a legal proceeding. You do not need a lawyer.”

“Dr…. Bernstein. Here’s the thing, a lawyer is sort of like an umbrella,” Moby said, looking more relaxed and in his element than Gwen had ever seen him, not a trace of Boogaloo Shrimp in his manner or his voice. “You don’t bring it, it rains.”

“I understand, Doctor,” Gwen said. “I’m just being careful. I hope you’ll be careful, too.”

She saw how it landed, the way Joe Leery’s eyebrows shot skyward before parachuting back down to the ridge of his brow.

“Okay,” Bernstein said, “and, well, you are certainly free to do so. Mr. Oberstein.”

“Doctor.”

“Before we get into the serious charges and issues that have been brought up in this case, I think we should all take a moment to remind ourselves of the most important thing, which is that the mother and the baby are both fine. That isn’t the issue here.”

Seven different variations on the pious nod, everybody safely in agreement on that score.

“Now, Dr. Lazar,” Bernstein said, “we’ve all got your complaint, and I think it’s pretty clear you feel that Ms. Shanks’s conduct not only lacked professionalism but diminished the quality of care—”

“Look,” Lazar said, the man everlastingly an asshole, through and through, a common enough trait among doctors statistically and one not necessarily falling, therefore, under the heading of Gwen’s good luck. “I’m not going to get into a pissing match, okay? I’m not interested in who screwed up, or how they screwed up, or whether or not it makes sense for people to have babies in their bathtubs. To me, this all boils down to the fact that Ms. Shanks, here, when I confronted her, as I was well within my rights to do, was belligerent, threatening, and aggressive. Okay? And if that isn’t considered inappropriate conduct toward staff by somebody with privileges at this hospital, then, I mean, what the fuck is?”

He glanced at the stenographer as if considering whether he ought to ask her to strike or let him rephrase his rhetorical question.

“Belligerent, aggressive, maybe,” said Dr. Soleymanzadeh, a handsome, hawk-faced man with preposterously beautiful brown eyes. He flipped through Lazar’s statement on the table before him, two double-spaced pages more or less free of specific detail or, for that matter, readerly interest. All of it heavily distorted but, in essence, Gwen supposed, true. “Threatening, I’m having a hard time, Paul.”

“That’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it?” said Dr. Leery, an old guy, the sweetest and least competent of the doctors in the room. “Aggressivity, belligerence, it’s hard to know whether—”

“You say Ms. Shanks threatened you,” Bernstein said, “but in your account, Paul, I can’t really say I—”

“Not physically, okay.”

“But she did threaten you.”

“I guess it was more like she menaced me.”

Gwen could feel Aviva and Moby watching her, waiting for her to interrupt, to deny, to argue. But she had not come here to argue with these motherfuckers. She waited, looking for her chance.

“Okay,” Bernstein said. “That’s sounding pretty much like a semantic shading to me. Could you, could we get you to possibly be more specific?”

It was weird; Lazar seemed abruptly to lose all interest in the proceedings that he had instigated. He sat under the humming CFL lights, looking wearier and more dead-eyed than ever. He shrugged, utterly bored by himself and all of them. “She got in my face,” he said, as if definitively, and though they waited for him to continue—even Gwen found herself perversely hoping for more—he seemed to have arrived at his conclusion.

Bernstein turned to Gwen. “Ms. Shanks, would you like to respond?”

Gwen made a show of checking with her attorney, who sat up straighter in his chair, mildly panicked. Patting his mental pockets as if he had left his wallet on some bus. His eyes reminding her, Silent and badass. Then, slowly, seeing she expected it, he nodded. Gwen rose as if obediently to her feet, knowing what she had to do and, worse, knowing how to do it, telling herself that it needed to be done.

“Thank you, Dr. Bernstein,” Gwen said. “Yes, I would like to respond. Dr. Leery, Dr. Soleymanzadeh, I’m not going to lie. I was very angry at the time. I’m sure that I was standing pretty close to the man, maybe even ‘in his face.’ But look at me.”

She stood up and completed one languid rotation on her own axis, reveling in her bulk. “First of all, I’d like to point out, I could plant my feet as appropriately far away from Dr. Lazar as he might want me to get. Large tracts of me would still be ‘in his face.’” A string of laughter cinched up the doctors; even the grim stenographer parted instantaneously with a smile. “Second,” Gwen went on, “do I look dangerous to you? Menacing?” No need, at this juncture, to go into her black belt, how, if she wanted to, even giving up a foot of height to Lazar and with all the litheness of a sandbag, she could snap any bone in the OB’s body. She glanced at Moby, the big man loving it, nodding, jowls shaking, as proud as if he had coached her every step of the way. “All that aside, fine, let’s give it to him. Let me concede his point.” Moby stopped nodding. “Aggressive. Belligerent. Menacing.” Old Moby wishing he had stuck to orcas. “Like I said, I was angry. Doctors, I had a right to be angry. I had just been subjected to the kind of vile, ugly treatment by that man, Paul Lazar, that I know, I would like to hope, would have made you angry, too.” She kept her gaze steady on the faces of the three inquisitors, fearing that if she glanced at Aviva, she might lose her nerve. “This man, Paul Lazar—I know you don’t want to hear this. And I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to tell anyone, not even my lawyer, because I knew that if I did, he would advise me to file a complaint with the EEOC. But I can’t just stand by in the end and let the man get away with it. Not when he is guilty of the worst kind of racist—”

“Ho,” Lazar said. “Whoa, hold on—”

“The worst kind of derogatory racial remarks.”

“Oh, come on, lady.”

“He made a crack about my hair. About black people’s hair, about processed hair.”

“I…”

The memory, then; a pinprick, the air whistling out of him, while understanding, troubled and shifty-eyed, flowed into the faces of Leery, Bernstein, and Soleymanzadeh. Seeped like the stain from a teabag darkening a cup of hot water. Gwen turned to Aviva, daring her partner to back her up or back away. The doctors—Lazar, too—turned to see what she would say, Aviva Roth-Jaffe, the Alice Waters of midwives, the rock upon which modern East Bay midwifery had been founded.

Aviva looked shocked; as shocked as Aviva ever looked. She hesitated for a long second, her full lips flatlined with unhappiness. Finally, she nodded. “That is true,” she said.

“He called me a witch doctor.”

“I never said that!”

“He accused me of practicing voodoo.”

“Ary, that’s not true,” Lazar said to Bernstein. Awake now, alive, working as much truthfulness into his voice as he could, more than was compatible with telling the truth. “I didn’t mean—”

“There was a waiting room full of witnesses,” Gwen said. “They all heard what you said. These people checked in with the intake clerk, I’m sure they can be tracked down. They’ll all verify it. You said, ‘Five more minutes of burning that incense, or whatever voodoo you were up to, and that mom doesn’t make it.’”

Lazar opened his mouth as if to protest, then closed it again.

Bernstein turned to Aviva, who shot a look at Gwen, hoping and doubting and most of all, Gwen thought, fearing that her partner knew what she was doing.

“I do remember that,” Aviva said. “I’m not sure those were the exact words, but Dr. Lazar did say something about us practicing voodoo.”

Bernstein looked at Lazar. “Paul?”

“How is voodoo racist?” Lazar said. “I just meant, like, you know, all that bullshit new age aromatherapy crap.”

“If you meant ‘aromatherapy,’” said Moby, going with it, ready to help Gwen press the advantage, “why did you say ‘voodoo’?”

“Why, indeed?” Gwen said.

“Maybe we ought to get general counsel in here,” Moby said.

“I really don’t think—” Bernstein began.

“I wish I had done a better job of controlling my temper,” Gwen said. “I truly do. I have devoted my entire professional life, my entire life period, to maintaining a consistently calm demeanor. I have always fought successfully to rise above. But when people start getting into that kind of rhetoric, that kind of hate speech, I’m sorry—in my view, I have an obligation to stand up to it.”

“We all do,” Moby said.

“Of course,” Bernstein said. “Gwen, nobody expects you to put up with that kind of talk. Paul, I have to say, I’m very surprised by this.”

“I’m sure,” said Leery, “that it was all a big misunderstanding of some kind. A misjudgment.”

“It was the end of his shift,” Soleymanzadeh said. “Clearly, the man was tired.”

Gwen saw that Aviva was chewing on a fingernail, a habit she reviled in herself and had struggled for years to defeat. She looked like she was feeling ill, about to get up and walk out of the room.

“Okay, here’s what I’d like to propose,” Bernstein said. “I’m going to say we review this, in light of what we’ve just heard. Take the matter under advisement for the time being, and—”

“I’m sorry,” said Lazar from behind his hands. “All right?” He lowered his hands, and the imprint they left in the sallow flesh of his cheeks glowed red for an instant like the residue of rage, then faded. “I was tired, just fried, and pissed off. I mean, you tell me I’m an asshole, okay, that’s not going to be news to me, right? Not to anybody in this room, maybe. But I’m an equal-opportunity asshole. I’m an asshole to everyone, black, white, blue, green.” Somehow, imperfectly, as if calling on rumor and hearsay and long-forgotten lore, he worked his features into something that meant to resemble a smile. “Ary, help me out here.”

“You have an edge,” Bernstein suggested.

“That’s what I’m saying. I totally have an edge. And that’s why, look, Ms. Shanks. Gwen. I’m sorry for what I said. Okay?”

Everyone turned to look at Gwen, ready for her to accept Lazar’s bullshit apology—that weary old dodge, I’m not a racist, I hate everybody equally!—and more important, ready for her to go on, break down, give in, and apologize right back. Just bat Aviva’s meaningless tennis ball of language over the net. Check the little box on Paul Lazar’s list.

“Nice try,” Gwen said. She picked up the legal pad on which she had jotted not a single note. “Aryeh, Dr. Soleymanzadeh. Dr. Leery. I appreciate your time.”

“Ms. Shanks,” Leery said, sounding woeful.

“Gwen, for God’s sake,” Aviva said, and then, to the doctors, with remarkable sincerity and warmth of tone, “she’s sorry, too. We both are. Our good relationship with Chimes is important to us. Personally and professionally.” As she came out with the second adverb, she underscored it on her own pad with four scratched words: COST OF DOING BUSINESS!

“No, Aviva,” Gwen said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I’m not sorry. Must be a black thing, huh, Paul?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Doctors, I look forward to hearing not only what you but also the EEOC have to say about all this. Now,” Gwen said with a wave to Moby, on a roll, talking mostly to herself, “if you’ll excuse me.”

Thus, feeling something very close to fly, and doing what she had to do, Gwen went to see about taking back her house.

“Mr. Stallings,” wrote A. O. Scott in his New York Times review of Strutter Kicks It Old-School, “has not only redeemed himself, he has also redeemed the genre of American cinema known so crudely as blaxploitation, and let us hope that this marvelous new film lays in its grave that ignoble moniker for all time.”

That was only one of the clippings. There were positive reviews from Time, Ebony, and Entertainment Weekly. Cover stories in People and Esquire. Quotations from these articles and reviews had been excerpted to run in print ads and on the packaging of the DVD, useful exclamations like BOLD! and TERRIFIC! and A NONSTOP ACTION-PACKED THRILL RIDE! Across the film’s poster, above a full-length image of Candygirl Clark and Cleon Strutter leaning together, each of them three quarters turned to the camera, her left shoulder against his right shoulder, giant letters proclaimed TWO THUMBS UP!!! EBERT & ROEPER.

“It looks so real,” Titus said.

That was not true at all, but he sounded like he meant it. Everything had been collaged using text, drawings, graphics cut from the pages of real newspapers and magazines, and computer-printed text that attempted with moderate success to match the fonts of the original publications. Leafing through this homemade archive, Julie felt an ache in his chest, though he wasn’t sure whether it was for the crude sincerity of the archive’s fakeness or for the faked and heartfelt sincerity of Titus, saying it all looked real.

“Totally,” Julie agreed.

The bin also contained seven drafts, six of them handwritten in slanting longhand on prison stationery, of the film’s script; a thin sheaf of old head shots of Luther Stallings when he was Luther Stallings, poker face but with that Strutter twinkle in the eye, beautiful and young. Synopses and diagrams done mostly by hand. A red folder tabbed BUDGET that held official-looking spreadsheets, and a blue one tabbed LOCATIONS that bulged with dozens of four-by-six photographs of Chinatown, East Oakland, the museum, and the interior of a restaurant that Julie recognized as the Merritt bakery.

A leather-grained pasteboard portfolio divulged a stack of storyboards for the film, strips of cartooned panels, executed in a style perhaps half a step above stick figure, that had been Scotch-taped to panels cut from pizza boxes. The greatest treasure and the pitiable heart of the whole archive was undoubtedly the poster, so large that it had to be folded in half to fit into the portfolio. It had been executed in colored pencil, no doubt over a long period of time, the colors laid down faint but smooth and even, as if rubbed with a tissue, giving everything the appropriate mistiness of a dream. The posed figures of Strutter and Candygirl were awkward, leggy even for Valletta Moore, and you could tell by the dead eyes and smiles that the faces had been copied, pretty accurately, from photos.

“Jailhouse artist,” said Archy’s dad, sounding apologetic and regarding the poster with a critical expression. He smiled; there was the twinkle from the ancient head shot. It reminded Julie of Archy, and then he thought of Titus, standing on the sidewalk outside the Bruce Lee Institute, scheming this whole adventure. “But I got to say, I think it looks pretty good.”

“Where you going to get the money to make it?” Titus said. “To make it for real, I mean.”

“Here and there.” Luther tried to come off as playful, having a secret, then seemed to worry that he might sound like he was full of shit. “You heard of Gibson Goode?”

Naturally, they had, Titus talking about rushing records, Grammy Awards, Julie basically grasping that the ex-quarterback had bent his wealth, legend, and magic on the destruction of Nat Jaffe and Brokeland Records.

“Some of it’s derivating from him, payment for services rendered. Some of it, I’m going to be relying on cash flow from another source of funds, a local businessman. A, uh, a former associate, you know, an old homey of mine, always been reliable. Between what he’s willing to part with and what Goode already committed to, all told…” Luther tapped the red folder with a finger. “I figure I can make this movie for, like, call it a hundred K. And that’s about what I’m hoping to raise.”

Luther’s fingers, his hands, amazed Julie. The backs of them were red-brown, fading to gold at the meridians where they met the palms. The fingers were slender, long and fluid, but you did not question their storied lethality. They looked like they had been shaped with fine tools from a regal pair of antlers.

“You have an old friend,” Titus said, “man has that kind of money, but you sleeping in a garage.”

Valletta laughed a low, unhappy laugh and got up from the table where she had progressed from her fingernails to painting her toes. “Boy has sense,” she said. She tucked her feet into a pair of blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals and then went tocking across the cement floor to the bathroom door, on which some airbrush master had rendered a photoreal image of a Conan the Barbarian–type character in the style of Frank Frazetta, sitting on a toilet with his ax and his sword on the floor in front of him, squeezing out a shit with a look on his face of barbaric joy. “Must come from his momma’s side of things.” She slammed the bathroom door behind her.

“Boy, we are comfortable as hell here,” his grandfather said. “Truly. Not that I don’t hope to improve our situation. But I would prefer if you didn’t keep harping on it like that.”

The compressor clanged the entire building like a single great fire alarm reverberating in the rebar, the air itself ringing as though struck. The noise of it was starting to get on Julie’s nerves. Somebody had started to brew up a batch of a noxious substance needed for bodywork, and it smelled to Julie like burning bananas.

“I’m sorry,” Titus said. It was the first time Julie had ever heard him employ those words in that configuration.

“Man ain’t exactly a friend, is the answer to your question. Let’s just say, he and I, we have some history. Long time ago, back in the Jurassic Age.” He gestured toward the ruin of the Toronado. “Motherfucking dinosaurs roamed the earth.” He interrupted himself to chuckle at his self-mockery, then seemed to lose the thread, maybe recollecting those dinosaurian days. “Dude and me, we had our misunderstandings, know what I’m saying? Water has for sure flowed under the motherfucking bridge. But he’ll come through. Basically, he wants to keep up the prosperity as a local businessman, he has to come through, is the type of situation we’re talking about.”

It sounded sketchy to Julie, and he guessed, given what he knew about recent decades in the history of Luther Stallings, that it might have something to do with drugs. Maybe the reason that Luther had “taken a rap” and “done a bid” was so the mysterious old friend from the Jurassic Age could stay free, and now, by prior arrangement, it was time for him to repay Luther for “carrying the weight.” Or maybe, Julie thought, wildly quoting from his cinematic syllabus over the past week and forgetting that Luther was not a master thief and had only played a master thief in one semi-bad and one wretched movie, maybe it was like in The Getaway and the mystery “running buddy” had arranged to get Luther released from prison because he needed him for a job. The shadowy benefactor in Julie’s imagination took on a distinct resemblance to the actor Ben Johnson, so he was bewildered to hear Titus’s grandfather say, “Your pops knows him. Chan, Chandler Flowers, the undertaker.”

“I know him!” Julie said, startling himself along with Luther Stallings, who seemed inclined to forget that Julie was there. “He’s on the Oakland City Council. He’s a customer at Brokeland. He likes King Curtis.”

“King Curtis, Earl Bostic, Illinois Jacquet,” Luther Stallings agreed. “He loves all them honkers.”

“Chan the Man,” Julie said.

“So-called, so-called,” Luther said. “Old Chan, I tell you what, old Chan never was the flexible type. A stubborn, stiff-necked man. Eventually, I feel confident, he is going to come around.”

“You best hope he don’t, you old fool.”

Luther Stallings was caught as helplessly off guard as Julie and Titus. If it had been some hood or, like, Ben Johnson standing there with a .45, Luther would have been toast. So much for instincts honed by years of arcane martial arts training or by the harsh realities of prison life. Presently, Luther remembered to brandish his walking stick, but it was too late, and he knew it. Phantom slugs starred his head and torso with phantom squibs. He lowered the stick, looking disgusted. “Goddammit, Eddie!” he said. “What the hell kind of hidden refuge you running here?”

Eddie called back to him, offhand, bored, “Oh, yeah. You have a visitor.”

“Yo, what up, Ed?”

“Hey, Archy. How’s the whip?”

“Running well, looking good.”

“Baby?”

“No, nuh-uh, not yet. Julie, Titus. Go get in the motherfucking car.”

Julie had known Archy Stallings since he was four years old. He tried to remember if he had ever, in all that time, seen him angry twice in one day. Luther was smiling, or showing his teeth, anyway, a weird smile, as if he had lost money betting against some outcome that would be worse than losing. “Look at this,” he said. “Big shorty.”

A little white mint appeared for an instant in Archy’s mouth, surfing the curl of his tongue. “Boys,” he said. “Car.”

“Man, fuck you,” Titus said.

For the past little while, the hour, hour and a half they had spent at Motor City, rattled by the air compressor like bones in a blender, watching Eddie Cantor’s blowtorch pirates butcher the Citation so it could be rebuilt, that magic slaughter like something out of Norse Gods and Giants, hot rod dwarves intent on replacing its headlights with diamonds and its tires with wild boars and its engine with the heart of a dragon, Valletta Moore moving on from fingernails to toes, crooking one long leg against the steel drum, craning forward so the boys were granted a fitful vision of the shadowland between her legs, which forever afterward would remain confused in Julie’s retroimagination with the vision of his homeland articulated by Luther Stallings as he snapped off stomach crunches by the abs-rippling dozen, that whole ancient Egyptian take on Oakland being a land of rebirth for the Black Man because of Pullman porters—all that while, sitting there on that skanky old sofa, Titus had seemed for the first time to relax. His angles softened, and his cords went slack. The things he said sounded sincere, unbracketed with an ironic formulation, a celebrity impression, or a parody of a gang-banging TV hood rat. His string had been jerked taut again, and Julie could not tell if it was Titus or some imaginary street Negro who said, “Man, fuck you.”

“We having ourselves a visit,” Luther said. “My grandson and me. And my man Julius. Ain’t that right, boys?”

“Yes, sir.”

My man. Julie reveled in the designation. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Something wrong with that?” Luther wanted to know. “You got an objection?”

“Oh, huh, suddenly he’s your grandson.”

“Not sudden. Been, what, how old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen.”

“Been fourteen years.”

“Fourteen years of you not knowing or giving a shit.”

“You should talk.”

“Ho, snap,” Titus said, as if he had enjoyed the retort, even though Julie could not imagine what there was to enjoy in the idea that for the fourteen years of your life, your father had cared as little about you as your grandfather. But Julie had observed that, like other black kids he knew, Titus seemed able to find humor in things that only would have made Julie feel sad.

“How’d you find us?” Julie asked Archy.

“A customer, owns the cab company. Mr. Mirchandani. You gave the driver your card?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Mr. M. recognized your name, he called my cell.”

“Mr. M. is nice,” Julie said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Archy said. “Okay, come on, you been rescued, now we got to go.”

Julie started to walk toward Archy, more than ready to go home, but when he turned to look back at Titus, he saw that they were going to be standing around having generational difficulties for a while longer.

“Come on! I got to go to Costco, meet up with my marching band. You boys get your asses in the damn car.”

“Go on,” Titus said. Then, softening it, “Yo, Julie, you go on home.”

“You are planning to stay here,” Julie said. “In, like, a garage.”

“Hello, Archy.”

“Hey, Valletta. What’s up?”

“Oh, you know. Just another motherfucking day in the ancient Egyptian Land of Rebirth.”

“Say again?”

Valletta only shook her head in an infinitesimal arc, almost a tremor, as if saying it again would cost her too much dignity.

“So, you up for the stepmom gig this time? Step-grandmom. Seems like you’re about to have another mouth to feed.”

“I had not heard that.”

“That the deal, Luther? Titus gonna stay here with you?” Archy took a slow, theatrical, but keen look around the premises of Motor City Auto Body. “Doesn’t look too comfortable. You and Valletta really sleeping here?”

Julie had been wondering that, too. He dreaded to consider the possibility that the two gray sofas, their original coloration lost to time, might be converted into places where human beings passed the night.

“It’s all right,” Luther said.

“Glad to hear it. Y’all got room for one more?”

Luther didn’t answer, just stood there with his arms folded and an offended expression, moving his lips as if trying to formulate an argument for why Archy ought to show more respect. At last he shrugged and turned to Titus. “Go on, now,” he said.

Titus crumpled. Everything bright, all the fierceness, drained out of his face. He didn’t move, didn’t say a word. It hurt Julie to see it, not because his friend was disappointed so much as because he ever could have thought Luther was going to let him stay.

“Go on!” Luther repeated. “I know Eddie Cantor don’t plan to start running no group home anytime soon.”

Over in the service bay, Eddie nodded, slow and firm, looking like he might be considering whether to point out to Luther that he was not running a hotel, either, or a halfway house, or a B&B.

Titus made a wild experiment. “Grampa,” he tried. The word sounded exotic on his lips, unlikely, as though it referred to something mythical or long extinct.

“One step at a time,” Luther said.

“If that,” said Archy, and Valletta said, “That’s right.”

“Go on,” Luther said. “We’ll see you again.”

In one final, loose-limbed access of emotion, Titus went slack as a child and groaned. Then he stood up straight and rolled, walking like Strutter, past Archy and toward the open doorway of the middle bay. “Man, how can you let your father live that way?” he said.

Julie, feeling unexpectedly that Archy, historically his favorite person in the world, was being a total douche toward Luther, who had straightened himself out and was really sorry about everything and simply needed a little help, could not bring himself to say so, but he went over to the bin on the workbench and pointed. “Do you think I could maybe have one of those head shots?” he said. “I really like your movies.”

“What?” Luther said, watching his grandson strut angrily out into the giant blank where at one time the trains and ships of a mighty nation had come to exchange cargoes, and Oakland had fattened on war and on the flesh of San Francisco. Walking out into the ghost footsteps of his great-grandfather, who worked the docks here and got blown up one day during World War II when Vallejo, or maybe it was Martinez, exploded. “Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”

Julie went over to the plastic bin. He was about to pick up the photo when he noticed, lying in a corner of the bin, the faded and wrinkled husk, like a vacated chrysalis, purply blue, of what could only be a Batman glove. It was stained dark along the fingers and fraying at the seams. It had the little old-school fins, and Julie guessed it was the same vintage as the door that hung from Sixto Cantor’s wall, with its red bat logo. In his imagination—patrolling the streets of Genosha or Wakanda or the corridors of Blue Area of the Moon in MTO—Dezire wore long purple gloves. It had never occurred to Julie that they ought to have fins. He snatched up the stray glove and shoved it down into the pocket of his cutoffs.

“Do you have a pen?” Julie asked Archy when he had chosen the picture he wanted and turned away from the bin.

Archy put a warning in his voice. “Julie.”

“I want to get an autograph. Come on. Don’t be a dick.”

“‘Don’t be a dick.’ That’s how you’re going to talk to me.”

“I want. An autograph.”

Archy fished a pen out of his pocket and click-clicked it. Then he handed it to Julie.

“You tell him it’s just a matter of time,” Luther said in a low voice as he scratched the pen across the bottom right corner of the photo. “Soon as my associates come through. After that, him and me can talk it over, see what’s possible.”

That was when Julie knew the Strutter 3 venture was doomed, if not imaginary. He determined on the spot to see that it came true, that it happened, that Strutter was resurrected one last time to kick it old-school, for the sake of Titus, for the sake of Luther, and for the sake of the world of cinema, too.

DON’T LOSE THAT DREAM, Luther wrote. BEST WISHES, LUTHER STALLINGS.

The late Randall “Cochise” Jones, his mortal remains. Washed, powdered, painted. Conduits and chambers flooded with aldehydes. Broken ribs set. Eyelids sealed, jawbone wired shut, fingernails trimmed close as in life, fingers woven into a trellis on the belly. Vestigial smile of forgiveness. Hallucinogenic Ron Postal leisure suit that cost three hundred dollars in 1975. Stacy Adams Spectators, two-tone blue and white. Thick ginger-gray flag of hair flown stubbornly to the left, as in life. Stashed like some fine tool or instrument in the velour darkness of a casket prepaid since 1997. The velour a specified shade of purple called zinfandel. Satin pillow propping up the ten-pound head. Exterior of the casket done up in a rich oak finish like the cabinet of a Leslie speaker, then trimmed out like the lost ark with finials and gargoyles of gold plate. Loaded onto a mortuary cot, ready to ride up the freight elevator to the garage at the back of Flowers & Sons Funeral Home, where a pristine 1969 Oldsmobile 98 Cotner Bevington, borrowed for the occasion from a funeral home up in Richmond, waited to ferry it over to Brokeland Records. Here the body would be laid out for a combination wake and funeral scheduled to begin at eleven A.M. and to last until three P.M. or the refreshments ran out. When the living had concluded their business of farewell, the casket would be rolled back to the capacious rear section of the hearse. Half an hour later, at Mountain View Cemetery, it would be put into the ground alongside what remained of the dead man’s second wife, Fernanda. And that would be the end of that. Mr. Jones’s funeral plan had called for the use of Flowers and Sons’ vintage 1958 Cadillac, but the Caddy had come down with a pain in the alternator. Even if Mr. Jones had known of the substitution, he hardly could have faulted the magnificent Olds 98, batlike and swooping, ready to haul ass through even the shadowiest valley.

“You need a permit, anything like that, lay a body out in a record store?”

“I don’t know. If you do, I guess Chan Flowers took care of it. Man took care of everything.”

“No doubt,” Singletary said. “No doubt. Now, seriously, watch out, ain’t no light, the upstairs switch is broken.”

You might have tunneled, given time enough and shovels, from the basement of Flowers & Sons, where the body of Cochise Jones lay in zinfandel darkness, to the basement of his house on Forty-second Street, but you probably would have run into problems trying to get in. It was a basement of the 1890s, resolute and dry. The house had been built by a retired riverboat captain from Sacramento who married a Portuguese girl of whom there were still living memories among a few of the very oldest neighbors, like Mrs. Wiggins. The smell of thousands of record albums submitting themselves to the depredations of bacteria and mold could not entirely erase the lingering smell of the cardoon cheeses that the old woman had manufactured for decades, along with hams and pickled tomatoes, in her basement.

“I hope he ain’t mad about the Cadillac,” Singletary said.

“If it’s the same Olds they had at Ardis Robinson’s funeral,” Nat said, citing the funeral two years back of a mainstay of the Bay Area funk circuit during the seventies and eighties, “it’ll work.”

Nat and Archy groped after Singletary down the basement stairs of Cochise’s house. The wall of the stairwell was smooth, cold Oakland sandstone.

“And you got the Chinese, right? I like that Green Street band. All military and proper. Ain’t one of those motherfuckers really Chinese, though.”

“No, they were booked. I had to go in a different direction. Hired this outfit, Bomp and Circumstance, you know them?”

“The lesbians?”

“They got the set list together, they know how the Chinese do it, the hymns and whatnot. Kai, Kai Fierro, works for Gwen? Plays the sax. She promised me they would send Mr. Jones home right.”

“But still,” Singletary observed, “lesbians ain’t quite what he asked for, either.”

“True, true.”

“That must nag at you.”

“At times it does.”

The downstairs light switch snapped. Ceiling fixtures gapped by dead tubes flirted with darkness. Then, with a click, they shone steady. Something on the order of, at Archy’s eyeball guesstimate, seven, eight thousand records, lovingly and helplessly amassed.

“I had no idea,” Nat said. His suit was an Italian number from the sixties, narrow lapels, no trouser cuffs, textured black silk flecked with gray. Skinny tie. Pointy little black loafers. He looked like Peter Sellers trying to recover from a very long night in 1964 and needing a haircut. “I mean, I knew, but I didn’t comprehend.”

“Man’s habit was out of control,” Archy said admiringly. His own suit was his least interesting, just a plain old Armani bought on sale at Men’s Wearhouse, two-button jacket, center vent. He wore it only to funerals and once, a long time ago, when he and Nat had gone to a Halloween party as the Men in Black. “God love him.”

“Fuck God,” Nat said. “Bastard killed our best customer.”

“You have fifteen minutes. Ten if you keep on blaspheming.” Singletary took out his phone and frowned at its display. “You ain’t interested, I’m calling Amoeba.”

The only son of the captain from Sacramento and the Portuguese lady had a son who died in Korea and a daughter, Fernanda, who passed the house on to Cochise Jones when she left him a widower. The Joneses never had any children, and Mr. Jones’s heir, his late sister’s daughter, lived somewhere down toward San Diego and wanted everything sold. So Garnet Singletary had gotten the house cleaned, painted, and patched and, in his capacity as executor, had hired himself to sell it. Archy got the strong impression that Garnet Singletary was also arranging to have one of his many shiftless relatives and hangers-on, whom he kept in a state of cash dependency on him for such eventualities, front a company that would buy the house from the estate, Garnet Singletary preferring, if possible, as a rule, to negotiate with himself. It seemed like a pretty good system to Archy. The King of Bling knew how to get over.

“We aren’t here to conduct business?” Archy looked at Nat. “Not today, right?”

Garnet and Nat said nothing, though neither appeared to see any cause for alarm in the prospect of dealing for the old man’s vinyl on the day of his interment.

“I thought we had just came to, like, admire,” Archy said.

“You go right ahead and admire,” Garnet said. “It’s your fifteen minutes, you spend it however you want to. Then I’m calling Amoeba records.”

The albums were in poly sleeves, for the most part, and for the most part had been kept edge-on in crates, but here and there in tottering piles, discs lay ruined by the horizontal, and some of cheaper stuff was not in plastic or was missing its paper inner sleeve. The crates were stacked into alleys and bends that lacked only a Minotaur.

After a ten-minute walkabout, Archy was prepared to pronounce the collection first-rate. He guessed that not quite half of the records had flowed through Brokeland on their way to this subterranean catchment. Another 20 percent, call it, bore price tags indicating provenance in the bins of other used-record dealers here in the Bay Area and all around the country. Ten percent was flotsam and jetsam, the random shit—fifties gospel, old Slappy White and Moms Mabley records, a surprising amount of Conway Twitty, George Jones, Merle Haggard. The rest—about 25 percent—was in the nature of Mr. Jones’s personal collection, as it were: recordings of sessions and dates he had played, the work of friends, colleagues, and rivals, maybe a hundred rare stride and boogie-woogie 78s, and a couple of complete sets of ten-inch LPs from the forties of classical works for organ, Bach, Buxtehude, Widor. These had belonged to Mr. Jones’s father, for many years house organist of Flowers Funeral Home as well as a number of local churches. There was no way to be sure after such a cursory sniff, but Archy figured the collection be low five figures, at least. Likely more.

“What do you think?” Nat said, turning out to be the Minotaur trapping Archy at the heart of the labyrinth. “Call it, what, fifteen? Offer twelve-five?”

He spoke in a low voice, not quite a whisper, but Singletary was busy grilling somebody on the phone, possibly Airbus.

“Who did?” Singletary was saying. “Well, where’d they see it? Uh-huh. Did it say anything? What did it say? Goddammit, Airbus, what did it say?”

“Twelve-five,” Archy said. “Nat, look here. Maybe this isn’t the right time to be… You are talking about putting more money into the business.”

“That’s right.”

Archy studied Nat’s face, trying to see if his partner was fucking with him. Nat believed that he owned a top-notch poker face, but in this belief he was sadly mistaken. His eyebrows in particular were unruly and signifying. The man thought he could conceal the contempt he felt toward his benighted fellow creatures, but the best he could arrange was to immobilize every part of his face, apart from the eyebrows, into a leaden mask through whose eye slits leaked an incandescent scorn. Right now, though, all that Archy could see on Nat’s face was enthusiasm, a certain smug pursiness to his lips that Nat got whenever he believed himself (again mistakenly, most of the time) to be about to get the upper hand in a negotiation. Nat had descended like Orpheus to this basement full of forgotten music, dressed in a funeral suit, hoping to bring Brokeland Records back to the upper world, the land of the living, with a vibrant infusion of collectible stock, stock that they would catch the scent of as far away as Japan.

“But, uh, I don’t—I’m not sure, even if I had that kind of cash—”

“I have it. Or I can get it. If you—Oh.” The truth that Archy was not ready, not today, to confess, had begun to seep in through those eye slits. The mask gave way, Nat’s jaw softening. “Archy, there is some shit here, in Japan, France, we could sell it for easily—”

“Did it know German?” Singletary called out to them from the stairs. “Mr. Jones’s parrot, could it speak German?”

Archy looked at Nat, who shrugged impatiently.

“Not to our knowledge,” Archy said.

“That ain’t him,” Singletary said to Airbus. “I never heard that bird do anything but sound like a Hammond B-3.”

“Can’t rule it out, though,” Archy called. “Bird knew all kinds of unlikely shit.”

“Maybe I should have gone into business with him,” Nat said.

“Oh, okay, now you’re all mad at me.”

Nat didn’t answer. He ran a furry finger along the printed spines of the records in a nearby crate. Archy saw that it was all Mr. Jones’s label-mates from his time on CTI. Hank Crawford, Grover Washington, Jr., Johnny Hammond. A number of them would be records that Mr. Jones had played on. Archy had probably owned most of the Creed Taylor catalog at one time or another, but it made an impression, seeing the records all together in that crate and those immediately above and below it, all those discs produced by Taylor or Don Sebesky back when Archy was a youngster, recorded by Rudy Van Gelder, pressed at some plant in New Jersey, then shipped by the scattered millions to the vanished mom-and-pop record shops of America, to the local chain stores of the seventies that had long since folded or been absorbed into national chains that had in turn folded, all those tasty beats and (mostly) tasteful string arrangements marbled together in a final attempt to reclaim jazz as popular music to be danced to and not just an art form to be curated, all those beautiful records with their stark jacket photography and their casually integrated personnel, reunited through the efforts of Mr. Jones. Archy had been breaking up estates for years and selling them off in pieces, but until now he had never felt the vandalism inherent in that act, his barbarity amid the crates of so many ruined empires.

“Nice,” Archy admitted, running his own finger along the spines of the records.

“Beautiful,” Nat said, giving the word the full benefit of his residual Tidewater accent.

“Nat,” Archy said, “nothing would make me happier than to let you take twelve thousand five hundred dollars you don’t have and buy these records for us, then you and me sit on top of them for two, three years like a couple of dad penguins. Listening to Idris Muhammad all day long, all that crazy old Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith he had, that Versatile side he did with Grant motherfucking Green that never got released, I mean—”

“I know, you saw that?” Nat hung on, fanning the little spark of it.

“But I have been fucking off, fucking up, and fucking around for too long. I need to get real, else I’m going to end up living in an auto body shop. I need insurance, a paycheck, all that straight-life bullshit. Gwen goes out on maternity, she doesn’t work, I’m going to need to take care of her, the baby. I got to settle some shit with Titus, Nat, that boy—”

“You guys back together?”

“Huh?”

“You and Gwen. She moved back in?”

“Last night.”

“Hey, all right.”

“Uh-huh, she moved in, then she threw my ass out. Said it was her house, too, and so on. She came home, I don’t— Something got into her. Had the gain on the flamethrower turned all the way up.”

“Yeah, I heard she was in fine form yesterday. I heard she did the full mau-mau routine on those assholes at Chimes.”

“Is that the term Aviva used to describe it, ‘mau-mau’?”

“That was just my interpretation.”

“Black midwife standing up for herself to a bunch of white doctors, that makes it a mau-mau?”

“I don’t have a problem with mau-mauing,” Nat said. “It’s a valid technique.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Archy said. “Black folks been holding off on the mau-mauing lately, till we got a ruling from you.”

“Where are we?” Garnet Singletary said, sounding prepared to be disappointed by the answer. He filled the space at the end of the narrow alley in which Archy and Nat seemed to have lodged.

“Where we are is, Archy is ‘getting real,’” Nat said.

“That doesn’t sound like an offer,” Singletary said.

“Nat, man, please. We can get into all of this tomorrow. We don’t need to get into it now. Mr. S., respect, I know you’re in a hurry, but today I am about trying to do this one thing of sending off Cochise Jones how he expected and how he deserved. I can’t be about anything else.”

“Are you going with Gibson Goode?” Nat laughed, a single incredulous bark. “Ho! Wait! Is that what you’re doing right now? You already took the job! Jesus Christ, Arch, is that why you’re here? Did he, did your friend Kung Fu give you his checkbook, tell you, go ahead, get in there, start stocking your Beats Department?”

“Hold up, Nat. Now you’re getting toward paranoid.”

“A short journey,” Garnet Singletary observed.

“I seriously doubt if the offer is even out there anymore,” Archy said. “Maybe I put the man off too long.”

“I can’t believe I told you what my number would be.”

“Why don’t you tell me your number?” Singletary suggested. “I’m the one selling the damn records. No, I tell you what. Do it this way, I give you a number. Seventeen thousand dollars.”

“I am supposed to give you seventeen grand to buy back a bunch of records I already bought and sold once before,” Nat said. “Some of these records are like children to me, you’re going to make me pay for them twice.”

“Give me a offer, then,” Singletary said, declining to acknowledge that Nat was starting to get bothered. “Then you get to sell them twice, too.”

“Fuck it,” Nat said. “We’re already having one funeral. Let’s bury everything. Right here and now. Have done with it.” He brushed past Singletary, in his pointy little loafers went banging back upstairs.

“Seem like maybe you been putting a lot of people off a little too long,” said Singletary.

“I know it,” Archy said. “I wish I knew what was wrong with me.”

“I got a theory.”

“Which is?”

“Maybe you are sick to death of mold-smelling, dust-covered, scratched-up, skipping, wobbly old vinyl records.”

“You said ‘no blaspheming.’”

“Maybe you sick of Nat Jaffe. Man started to get on my nerves five minutes before I met him.”

Archy experienced a certain temptation to assent to this theory, but it felt disloyal, so he only said without enthusiasm, “Huh? Nah, man, Nat’s my nigger.”

Singletary seemed to weigh this claim. “Was just a question of knowing how to fry a chicken leg,” he said, “I might almost be prepared to agree to that description.”

“So, yeah. I guess you better call Amoeba or whoever. Call Rick Ballard down at Groove Yard.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Singletary said. “Okay, now, hold on. Let me just ask you. What was his number going to be?”

“He said something about eleven. Fifty-five apiece, but I don’t have it, and as far as I know, neither does he.”

“And if he did, if he came up with the money, and you all acquired Mr. Jones’s collection here for something south of fifteen but north of eleven, would you be able to make money on that?”

“Hard to say.”

“Oh, no doubt.”

“A little, maybe. Maybe a little more than a little. Nat was saying about France and Japan, but that’s no sure thing. It would improve our inventory, I mean, damn, there is some tough stuff here. Maybe if we expanded our website, did more of the shows. Put a little more push into the business side of the business, spent a little less time shooting the shit around that counter.”

“Aw, no, don’t say that,” Singletary said. “I might back off from the fool offer I am about to propose. Because you know, truth is, I don’t give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I’m like to want to slap somebody. I don’t really like any jazz, to be honest. The kind of style Mr. Jones played, mostly have a steady groove to it, that was all right, but when I get home at the end of a working day, Miller time, put some music on, you know what I like? I like Peabo Bryson.”

“Peabo had his due share of jams.”

“Here’s my concern in this matter. I know you think I am messing around in all that protest shit your partner’s stirring up to annoy Chan Flowers. Just because I maintain historically cool relations with the councilman. And true, that is part of the reason. But the real reason is something that’s not that. The reason, I remember when that record store used to be Eddie Spencer’s. And before that, when I first got out of the army, right after the war, it was called Angelo’s Barbershop, and those old Sicilian dudes used to go in, get their mustaches looked to or whatnot. I have known Sicilians, and so I feel confident saying, your store been full of time-wasting, senseless, lying, boastful male conversation for going on sixty years, at least. What that Abreu said the other day at that meeting, he was right. It’s an institution. You all go out of business, I don’t know. I might have to let in some kind of new age ladies, sell yoga mats. Everybody having ‘silence days,’ walking around with little signs hanging from their neck saying ‘I Am Silent Today.’ I would take that as a loss.”

“Garnet Singletary,” Archy letting amazement show on his face. “One-man historical preservation society. Turning soft on me.”

“Lot of bad things happen once you start to get old.”

“So, what? You going to just give us the records?”

“Now, how can I do that? These are Mr. Jones’s records. They are not mine to give. You know that. But maybe the estate could advance them to you all on consignment. And you all could pay the estate back at some later date. Once you done selling them in France and Japan.”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Well, thank you, Garnet.”

“It must be the funeral has me feeling sentimental.”

“You’re a good man.”

“You put that around, I will have to deny it.”

“Same with what I said about Nat being what I said, to me. Do not tell anybody. Least of all Nat. It’d go right to his head.”

“Maybe after he earn a few more merit badges, we let him in the club.”

“All right.”

“Meantime, you need to figure out what you want to do about yourself, Archy Stallings. You need to make up your mind.”

“Common refrain,” Archy said.

When they went back upstairs, they passed Mr. Jones’s living room, which had a denuded air but with that fussy feel, crewel and fake fruit, as if it had been decorated by ladies of a former age, maybe by the Portuguese lady herself. In the center of the room, two steel suit racks waited side by side, hung thick with the dead man’s leisure suits. The collective palette ran to bold, even heedless, in the seventies manner, or to muted potting-clay tones, something a touch Soviet or even Maoist in the olive tans and rose grays. The plaids had left Scotland far behind and struck out for new worlds of gaudiness, including one in red, white, black, and sky blue that always reminded Archy of a place mat at IHOP.

“Look at that,” Archy said. “Look at those things. And I’ve seen him wear them all.”

“Believe it or not there is actually a lively market,” Singletary said. “I looked into it.”

“Maybe I need to get into a new line,” Archy said.

“Here go Airbus.”

The big man met them at the top step, wearing a beautiful midnight-blue tracksuit, his hair razored down to a glaze on his scalp. Singletary’s car, a late-model Toyota Avalon, stood double-parked in the street, flashers going. Kai Fierro, Gwen’s receptionist, got out of the passenger side. She wore her hair greased back à la Fabian Forte and carried her sax in a soft gig case. She had on a blue brass-button high school marching-band jacket like they all wore in Bomp and Circumstance, corny yacht-captain hat complete with scrambled eggs on the visor.

“This suppose to be the, uh, leader of that Chinese marching band,” Airbus said as though humoring the ranting of a nutjob, so as to keep her calm. “Was outside your store with another white chick named, uh, Jerry something, and two older ladies, trumpet and a sax. She say they made a appointment with Stallings. Want to know what the deal is, what the route is.”

“Hey, Arch,” Kai said. She shook hands with Garnet Singletary, all square and manly, telling him, “I’m Kai.”

Something kind of a turn-on for Archy, funny, in the way she shook Singletary’s hand. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

“It’s an honor,” Kai said. “Cochise Jones, that’s a name that, well, a lot of us in the band, it means something to us.”

“You know he was born in New Orleans,” Archy said. “That’s why he loved the whole funeral-band thing. Always said Chinese people was the only ones around here really knew how to do a proper funeral.”

“Tell you what, though, those guys over in the city, it’s not like New Orleans. They don’t really swing,” Kai said. “Stuff we rehearsed for today, Archy, I mean, it’s all that straight-ahead military funeral stuff. Is that okay? A lot of hymns, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and that type of deal.”

“Okay,” said Airbus, big man looking positively offended, “‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ now, how is that Chinese?”

“But we practiced a lot, you know. And plus, I have to say we put together a pretty swinging arrangement of ‘Redbonin’ ’ that we’d like to do.”

“That sounds just fine,” Archy said, but he was frowning as he took in Kai’s tacky little tenth-grade band jacket. “Now, let me ask you this. What size you wear?”

Softly, under the sound of traffic from Telegraph and the idling of Singletary’s car, almost beneath the threshold of audibility, a bass note sounded and then went up a step. To the south, down over West Oakland, a black zeppelin sniffed at the sky with its pointed snout.

“A’s playing Tampa today,” Archy said. “Everybody’s going to look up, see that, get all excited. Talking about, ‘There go the Dogpile blimp!’”

“I was in the Dogpile down in L.A.,” Kai said. “It was awesome.”

“You’re killing me,” Archy said.

God said, “What the fuck is this shit?”

In the cabin of the Minnie Riperton, Walter Bankwell did not bother to try to look at ease. He did not enjoy the experience of flying in the dirigible, too nervous to have a drink, get loose. And he did not like it when everybody else got loose on board the Riperton, either, though the primary, express purpose of the airship (apart from its function as an irresistible eye magnet) turned out to be corporate entertainment of high-rolling clients, actors and singers and rappers, media folk, athletic shoe barons, that bunch of inner-city librarians won some kind of contest or something, got up there in the sky with G Bad and his posse and went completely out of control.

Walter was not afraid of heights per se; it was the gasbag that worried him. He understood perfectly that there was a difference between helium and hydrogen, but inert and gigantic as it might be, there was something fragile, insufficient, about the Riperton; its name, with its hint of tearing fabric, didn’t help matters. Zeppelins had had their chance, and they had failed. The world had moved on, like with eight-track tapes. Though an eight-track, sure, it might gum up, eat its own innards, one of the little plastic wheels might crumble away to dust. But it was never going to blow your ass up.

Walter felt ill at ease; and surely the truth was that he was not meant to feel at ease, even if he had been willing to drink and get loose. That, and not public or client relations, was the true point of owning a zeppelin; it affirmed the godhood of Gibson Goode, living in his heavenly mansion. Today Walter had been summoned to the throne in the sky to learn of His displeasure.

God picked up the Oakland Tribune that lay on the little plastic hump of a coffee table. “You saw this?” he said.

Headlines, thought Walter bitterly. “‘VINTAGE RECORD STORE OWNER TURNS IT UP TO 78 IN BATTLE AGAINST NATIONAL CHAIN,’” he read. “Yeah, I saw it. Man comes off sounding like a dick. Turn it up to seventy-eight all the time, you end up sounding like Donald Duck.”

“That is a valid comparison,” Gibson Goode said. “In those kind of environments, I don’t know why, sports cards, rare magazines, autographs, the dicks tend to, like, attract a following. But that ain’t even what I’m worried about,” Goode said. “Man, I could give a fuck about that little squirrel-nut-zipper white boy trying to rile up twenty-seven lactose-intolerant white people.”

“All right. Then what are you worried about?”

“I’m worried about you.”

A large white envelope, a mailer with green hash marks around the edge, had been exposed when Goode lifted up the newspaper. The man had at hand all the materials he needed for his presentation, including the bodyguard, Taku, sitting in the dining nook, seriously compromising the vehicle’s vertical lift. Carrying a gun on board an airship, accidental discharge might happen anytime.

“This came to my office in Fox Hills,” Goode said. “Looking like it was sent by a nutball.”

It was a color photograph printed on plain paper, the colors at once sickly and vivid, a starfish thing, purple-blue twisted against a moiré of pale blue-green. A scan, on second thought: a 3-D object laid on the glass and photocopied, dark against the infinite, blank, pale blue-green dazzle of whatever you were taking a picture of when you left the cover open on a Xerox machine. The unscannable world.

“Looks like a glove,” Walter said.

“Letter that came with it says it’s a glove.”

“Letter from who?”

“Luther Stallings. Saying how it ties your uncle to the killing of Popcorn Hughes, has blood on it, DNA, kind of thing they can test even after all these years.”

“Huh.”

“Chan Flowers having some history he’d like to keep hidden? That was fine back when him and me were on two different sides of the question. Know what I’m saying? Now that we’re on the same side, I am not comfortable having all this, uh, memorabilia, floating around out there. Getting photocopied and shit.”

“A purple glove?” Walter said.

Goode threw the photograph at Walter’s head. “How the fuck do I know?” he said. He got up and went to the window and looked down at the bowl of the stadium. “You know I was drafted by the A’s,” he said. “As a pitcher.”

“I saw you,” Walter said. “USC against Cal, like ’85, I was after this girl Nyreesa, used to work food service over at Evans Field. Everybody was talking about how there was scouts there from the A’s and Giants both.”

“I threw a two-hitter. Had no run support. One guy gets a cheap little inside-out hit, then I left a mistake hanging over the inside corner to the next guy. RBI double. That was all they needed.”

“I got shut out, too,” Walter said. “Only by Nyreesa.”

“Okay.” Goode whirled from the window, catching Walter off guard. Walter jumped back, lost his footing, and fell on his ass. Goode came to stand over him, staring down at him, his eyes not entirely devoid of contempt. “After he puts in an appearance at the funeral, Councilman Abreu is going to join me at the game at his own suggestion. I thought he might enjoy sitting in a corporate box, but he said he likes to sit in the stands. I got us seats right behind the A’s dugout.”

“Abreu.”

“For some reason, he got the idea that it might be worth looking into the tax structure and other elements of the deal I’m making with the city, thanks to the hard work of your uncle, to develop the old Golden State market site. How the EIR was conducted, what kind of ties I have to the planning commission, et cetera.”

“He’s shaking you down, too.”

“What is it about Oakland? Dumb-ass city always has to do the last-minute Gilligan, fuck it up for itself somehow or other. Okay, not this time. This time Skipper’s going to do what’s necessary. And if I decide your uncle Chan’s carrying too much liability? Up here, I have to, you know, you got to consider the excess weight.”

Kung Fu thought in that case, maybe they should have left Taku back at the airport, but he kept the thought to himself.

“You show your uncle the picture, show him this letter that came with it, all about the night of Popcorn Hughes. Show him the whole mess. See what he wants to do about it. Tell him I would like it smoothed over. Tell him I require reassurance. Else maybe I can get that reassurance from Councilman Abreu, know what I’m saying?”

“Most definitely,” Walter said. “Now, when do we land?”

After the fathers left to meet Singletary in the dead man’s basement, the boys worked. Rolling the big bins out of the way, carrying stock into the back room, elbow-deep in the smell, the leaden gravity of records. The revealed floor of Brokeland, a palimpsest of red and white linoleum worn here and there to an underlayer of green and cream, proved to be skankier than Archy had suggested. Titus grabbed the broom and assigned Julie to the dusting. They were being paid for their time, and this had the interesting effect of making Titus happy. He had located a sister of his mother’s somewhere down in Los Angeles. She would not send him any money, but she had told him that if he could make his way to her, she would take him in. He had a purpose in life; that purpose was to break poor Julie Jaffe’s heart.

There was an old-fashioned feather duster, comical blue plumes plucked from an old lady’s hat or the ass of an ostrich in a Warner Bros. cartoon. Julie went after the dust with it, feeling like Bugs Bunny, keeping an eye all the while on Titus. Titus took his broom work seriously, gridding the floor with grit and bug legs, neatly collapsing everything into tidy mounds, crouching to whisk it into the pan. His undershirt white against the skin of his shoulders, no belt, the plaid of his boxer shorts visible where the waistband of his jeans gapped. Julie, flicking here and there with his feather duster, felt that confusion of desire, remembering how, when he was little, he used to get turned on by Bugs Bunny, something in the hips, the pert cottontail, the way Bugs Bunny’s ears lay back when he was pretending to be a girl, lipsticked, kittenish.

“Who’s that suppose to be again?” Titus was resting on the broom, looking at the beaded curtain Julie had painted the summer before last, literally all summer, from the end of fifth grade to the beginning of sixth, one infuriating bead at a time.

“It’s supposed to be Miles, but—”

“Miles Davis? Trumpet? See, I’m learning it.” Titus turned and caught Julie studying the long, lean Bugs Bunny arc of his waist and hips. Julie pulled a feather out of the duster without quite meaning to. “We all done for now?”

Julie pretended to take a look around the store. They had brought nice shirts and clean pants for the funeral, neatly folded by Aviva, in a Berkeley Bowl tote bag in the back room.

“They’ll be back in a few minutes,” Julie said. “We could get dressed, or—”

They went into the back room. Julie pulled his pants down and opened himself up, and Titus spit into his hand and put his dick into Julie for a minute. It hurt, but in a way that Julie found interesting. The pain, he felt, bore further examination; he would have liked to study it for a while. There was something that happened every time Titus drew back for the outstroke that was closer to relief than to pain. But Titus pulled out after a minute or two. “I thought I heard the door,” he said.

He went into the washroom and got up over the little sink, straddling the basin. Julie took off his dusty jeans. The foaming soap, Titus’s fingers, the astonishment of his penis.

“I am not gay,” Titus said when he came out of the bathroom. “If I was gay, I would tell you. I would not tell anybody else, but I would tell you.”

“Okay.”

“It’s like, I don’t want to kiss you or nothing. Like, be your boyfriend.” He shook his head firmly. “I’ll fuck you, though.”

“Okay.”

“But you are. Gay.”

“Uh.”

“You know that, right?”

“I guess.”

They put on the clean jeans, two short-sleeved shirts with button fronts, new from Target for the occasion. They might, Julie thought, have been brothers. In Berkeley it was far from impossible.

Titus reached his right hand to Julie, slow, fingers spread, arcing toward him. They hooked hands at the thumbs and bumped chests. Titus wrapped an arm around Julie. Julie felt protected in the lingering embrace, though he knew that when Titus let go of him, he was going to feel nothing but abandoned.

Nat left the basement of Cochise Jones’s house prepared to impose on his erstwhile partner a life sentence of silence. At the peak of his game, he could maintain a state of angry monosyllable for days on end.

For the first hour or so, he proved able with no trouble to sustain a nice meaty silence as he, Archy, and the boys moved aside the record bins and humped piles of rare vinyl into the back room, set up tables for the food and the booze, and hung the place with photographs of Cochise Jones. On Mr. Jones’s customary stool, they set a large-format photo of him dressed in chaps, vest, and Stetson, riding a piebald horse in the Black Cowboy Day parade. Julie appeared to mistake his father’s reticence for due funereal solemnity. Titus seemed not to notice or to give a shit or both. As for Archy, he was used to weathering Nat’s silences. It was going to take longer than an hour for Nat to begin to see any effect in that quarter.

But then the Olds 98 showed up at the store to deliver the guest of honor. Two of the Flowers nephews wheeled in the remains of Cochise Jones, inside a coffin that looked like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, everything but the candy-stripe wings and Dick Van Dyke. Archy directed Flowers’s crew to install it behind the glass counter. When they had everything squared away, the nephews palmed the lid, preparing to lift it off the coffin, and that was when Nat found himself obliged to ruin a perfect start on one thousand years of silence and converse with his betrayer.

“We really are doing the open casket?” he said.

“You have a problem with that?” said one of the nephews.

“Just, I’ve bought records in a lot of sketchy joints,” Nat said. “None of them ever had a dead body you could look at.”

Archy seemed to weigh this as if searching for a counterexample, a used-vinyl store on the South Side of Hades or Philadelphia. Then he turned to the nephews. “Well,” he said. “How’s he looking in there?”

After a few seconds of mutual consultation, the larger of them nodded slowly, once.

“Real nice,” the other one said.

Archy said, “Go on, pop the top on that thing, we can take a look.”

The Flowerses lifted the lid, and Julie and Titus pressed in close to see what would be revealed. Julie’s first dead body: Nat felt a sudden panic at the thought. He had prepared no words, no commentary, no sidebar or protective formula to contextualize or cushion the moment for Julie or, for that matter, for himself. In his lifetime, Nat had seen maybe half a dozen people laid out dead, and each time the sight seemed to brown the page of life, to tarnish the world’s silver and dull its gold. For no good reason but the paralysis of masculine panic, he suppressed the urge to put his arm around Julie, turn him away from the sight.

“Damn,” said Titus with unfeigned admiration.

“Come on, Nat,” Archy said. “How you going bury that, not even take a look?”

The leisure suit that Cochise Jones had prescribed for his interment was nothing so common as loud, ugly, or intensely plaid. The gem of his collection, it was profound and magical in its excess. White, piped with burnt orange, it had a rhinestone-cowboy feel to it, except at the yoke and at the cuffs of its sleeves and trousers, where it flamed into wild pseudo-Aztec embroidery, abstract patterns suggesting pink flowers, green succulents, bloodred hearts. Cochise had worn this suit, which he always called “my Aztec number,” three times before: once backing Bill James at the Eden Roc on the night when Hurricane Eloise hit; once at the Sahara in Las Vegas, where it attracted favorable comment from Sammy Davis, Jr.; and once, with improbable consequences, before a hometown crowd at Eli’s Mile High. After that storied night in the annals of Oakland rumpus, Cochise had retired the Aztec number, sensing that it was a leisure suit of destiny. A suit not to be squandered on an ordinary day in a man’s life, even if that man, on an ordinary day, rocked the B-3.

Nat looked at Julie. The boy was hugging himself. It took another few seconds for Nat to shame himself into providing this service for his son, and put his arm around the boy. Julie wore a too-tight short-sleeved button-down shirt patterned in black-and-white microcheck. His shoulder bone found a familiar notch in Nat’s inner elbow. His broomstick arm still had an infantile give. As soon as Nat touched him, the boy relaxed.

“He looks awesome,” Julie said.

“Yeah?”

“Totally.”

“Okay,” Nat said to Archy. “We do it open.”

Aviva showed up at a quarter to eleven, snaking a spot as it opened up for her, in front of the hearse parked outside of Brokeland Records.

Nat was hanging around on the sidewalk, trying to look like he was not waiting for her. But she knew how he looked, standing at a bus stop when it was raining and the bus was late. He was waiting.

When she pulled into the spot, he got into the car and closed the door. Kind of a bank-robber move, Aviva thought. A man in a hurry to get away.

“Doris Day spot,” he said.

“Totally. Anybody here yet?”

“Just the home team. And, of course, the corpse. The cadaver.”

An off note in his voice, a hollow thud of irony. Looking rumpled and disenchanted in his Belmondo suit. Not even a glance at her to see what she had chosen to wear to Mr. Jones’s wake or whatever this thing today was supposed to be. For the record, she had on a black Donna Karan pantsuit, bought at Crossroads, over a pearl-gray shell and a staid pair of walking sandals. All business for the business at hand, except for the scarf, which she had tied into a headband. A birthday gift one year from Mr. Jones, it had belonged to the late Fernanda. It was patterned with peaches and peach-tree leaves, and it was a fiery thing for a funeral. Nat really ought to have remarked on it.

“I went to Smart and Final. It’s all in the trunk.”

“Thank you.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. Then he hid his face in his hands. That was as close to a breakdown as Nat ever got, the heroic attempt to confine his weeping to the region encompassed by his palms. It always slew her.

“Oh, baby, what is it?” she said. “Come here.”

She held him, ready to ride it out while he massaged his sadness, pushed it all back up into his face. During the first part of their marriage, Aviva would have encouraged him to go ahead and let himself cry. But Nat, she had finally learned, would not, possibly could not, let himself cry, and maybe it was not fair to try to make him all the time. Maybe it was better to leave the poor man alone.

So now Nat really shocked her as his hands fell away, like youthful illusions, to reveal a man in the grip of a full-fledged jag. Soft, damp, and almost grandmotherly in his sorrow, mooing dolefully. Shoulders shaking. And all for old Mr. Jones. Imagine that. After so many years of wishing and resignation, Aviva saw her husband dissolved in tears, and found that the sight, this soft crumbling of his castle, kind of irritated her. It was not Nat: a dweller at the poles, prone to transports of anger and tantrums of joy.

“I know how much you liked him,” Aviva said, taking some Kleenex from her purse. “I liked him, too.”

Nat blew his nose, took a deep breath, let it out. “I did,” he said. “I really did like him. But that isn’t—that’s not why—”

“Then what’s wrong? Nat, what happened?”

“I had a fight with Archy. We’re breaking up.”

“What?”

“He’s divorcing me. Because? He’s sick of all my fucking bullshit.” He gave another snort into the Kleenex, equal parts mucus and derision. “What the hell kind of reason is that?”

“He’s taking the Dogpile job?”

“I hope he is. I sure as fuck don’t want him around anymore.”

“Nat.” It was not that Archy wanted a divorce; Nat, she understood from his petulant tone, felt like he was being dumped. “Archy and Gwen are clearly going through some kind of a thing right now.”

“Yeah. It’s called real life.”

“You’re saying that until now Gwen Shanks and Archy Stallings have been living in a fantasy world.”

“I bet Gwen feels like she’s been living in a fantasy world. Black midwife and a million white mommies. Black people live their whole lives in a fantasy world, it’s just not their fantasy.”

“Uh-huh,” Aviva said, sensing with a migraine throb a session in Jaffean theoretics coming on. “So, okay, let’s talk about what you’re going to do.”

“What I’m going to do. Okay. Let’s. One thing? I don’t want to sell fucking used vinyl records anymore.”

“Nat.”

“I actually, you know, I actually hate records. No. Let me restate that: I hate music. All music. Yeah, I repudiate it. Fuck you, music! Music is Satan. We serve its hidden agenda. It’s like a virus from space, the Andromeda strain, propagating itself. We’re just vectors for the contagion. Music is the secret puppet master.”

“Nat.”

“Think about it, Aviva. Music actually has us to the point, we’re walking around with fucking pods, with buds in our ears. Nah, I’m out. I think I’m going to get into, like, I don’t know, cheesemongering. I’m going to monger cheese. You can help me. Forget birthing babies. Christ, we already have enough babies in the world. What we need more of is really good cheese. I mean, tell me, why should we have to go all the way up to North Berkeley, there, to go to the Cheese Board for the top-quality cheese product? Why shouldn’t Oakland have a cheese collective, too, you know, South Berkeley/Oakland? Wait, no, fuck cheese. Cheese is all about spores and, and, molds and all that shit. Maybe cheese is trying to colonize our brains, too. Cheese and music duking it out for control of the human nervous system.”

“Nat—”

Rap of a hand. They both jumped. Nat rolled down his window, and Julie was there, looking cute in his little-boy grown-up shirt, with Titus beside him just looking grown up. Two boys, chomping two big hunks of gum.

“Hey, Ms. Jaffe,” Titus said.

“What are you guys doing?” said Julie, making a quick study of the dishevelment of Nat’s face, hair, and suit. “What’s wrong with Dad?”

“What’s wrong? It’s a funeral, Julie,” Aviva said. “I want you and Titus to unload all that crap out of the back of the car. The ice, the sodas. Carry it in.”

Chomp, chomp.

“Okay,” Julie said eventually. “Come on, T.”

The boys went around to the Volvo’s hatch and threw it open. Aviva watched in the rearview mirror as Titus encircled four bags of ice with his long arms and hoisted them, his face showing only a faint tautness from the strain. Duly, Julie tied the ribbon of his arms around four bags and lurched, pitched forward like a man with a stomach cramp, away from the car.

“‘Come on, T,’” Nat said. “Fucking little poseur.”

She laughed, happy to see him irritable again. She let go of every part of him except for his hand, which she squeezed between both of hers until their wedding rings clinked like flint and steel or a pair of champagne flutes. “You’ll be all right?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“You know it’s all going to work out in the end?”

“No,” he said. “But I guess I can probably fake it.”

They got out. He grabbed two cases of Coke pony cans, and she grabbed a case of orange Jarritos, and they followed the boys into the store.

“Whoa,” Aviva said when she saw the body laid out in a casket pimped with brass like something from Jules Verne. On a flood tide of burgundy velour, the face of Mr. Jones bobbed like a hunk of driftwood worn smooth. The leisure suit gave way at its extremities to the devouring work of fire and vines. “Is that the famous Aztec number?”

“Its farewell appearance.”

“Hey, Aviva.”

She turned to Archy, standing by the food table, stuffed with partial success into an undertaker suit. She searched his face, legible as a baby’s, and saw only a mournful squint appropriate to the occasion. No sign of guilt or remorse over whatever had passed between him and Nat this morning. No hangdog skulk to his shoulders. She knew enough of his history with Gwen—in fact, she knew well more than enough—to know that regret might be days in making its appearance.

“You are looking fine, Aviva,” he said. “Wore Fernanda’s scarf, I see.”

“Thank you, Archy,” Aviva said.

Nat put a hand on her shoulder. She felt the weight of him transfer like a message. Without turning around, she knew that he was scowling at Archy, who bunched up his lips and rolled his eyes in an impatient way that confirmed her intuition.

“Sure you got enough fried chicken?” Aviva said.

Along the food table ran a sawtooth of fried-chicken mountains. Wreathed in clouds. Air tanks and Sherpas were required to reach its peaks.

“You’re kidding, right?” Nat said. “Wait, seriously, should I go get some more?”

They had brought the food in from Taco Sinaloa and from the Merritt bakery, Mr. Jones’s favorite places to eat. Endless llanos of green enchiladas and tamales, a Popocatépetl of al pastor. From Merritt, that high sierra of fried chicken. Aviva knew it pained Nat not to serve his own fried chicken at this of all parties, but Aviva had made him promise, like God postdiluvian, never to destroy the kitchen again.

“I’m kidding,” she said. “But I will mention, when black folks and Jews feed a crowd, you know many chickens will die.”

“I told Aviva how we’re closing down the store,” Nat said. “For good. Per your wishes.”

“You’re—closing—the store?” Julie said, the words emerging between grunts as he staggered past on his way to the drinks table with two cases of Martinelli’s.

“Never you mind,” Aviva said. “Archy, is it true? Did you take the job at Dogpile?”

“No,” Archy said. “I didn’t do anything, which I intend to keep on doing for as long as I can, at least until tomorrow. Nat’s just bugging out.”

Aviva grabbed hold of Nat by the elbow and turned him, boxing in his gaze with her own until he gave up and met it. “Nat, are you bugging out? If so, I need you to stop. For like the next four hours. No bugging, no tripping, no rapid cycling. You need Archy. And Archy needs you. Right, Archy?”

“From time to time,” Archy said.

“You have, what, fifty people about to show up, plus a dead guy.”

“More like a hundred,” Archy said.

“So man up,” she told her husband. “Maybe you won’t be partners after today, maybe you will. But today you definitely very much still are. And as partners, you have an obligation to stand up, to represent, for Mr. Jones.”

“That all sounds great, Aviva, and you’re such a grown-up, my hat is off to you,” Nat said. “But there’s a level underlying this thing between Archy and me that you can never hope, for all your wisdom and maturity, to understand. And that level is the one that’s all about vinyl.”

Aviva considered a number of possible replies, pointed, dismissive, sardonic. She held her tongue, because if it was about vinyl—and men like Archy and Nat would wage wars, found empires, lose their dignity and their fortunes for the sake of vinyl—then Nat was right. She would never understand.

“But I take your point,” Nat said. “And so I’m going to think of this as our last day, and live it accordingly, and do my best to honor the memory of Cochise Jones. All right? Just don’t expect me to speak to Archy.”

“He give you the silent treatment?” Aviva asked Archy.

“Might have. I didn’t notice.”

“He did,” Titus said. “Most definitely.”

Everyone turned to look at him. For Titus Joyner, in the presence of adults, it was a pretty long speech.

Gwen showed up almost twenty minutes late, working on fifteen hours of sleep in her very own bed, feeling like she had taken a powerful cortico-stimulant. Feeling dauntless, even when it turned out she could barely get in the front door. All kinds of people had come to represent for Mr. Jones. Neighborhood folks, hipsters, beefy and bearded record collectors. Kai and her bandmates, eighteen women all resplendent in leisure suits from Mr. Jones’s collection. The regulars, Moby, Mr. Mirchandani, Singletary. By the casket, Chan Flowers, arms folded, that James Brown shine on his big old hair, eyed the face of the dead man with a critical squint. Everybody standing, except for a few lucky folks right toward the front counter who had been granted the use of folding chairs.

Gwen’s gaze found Archy’s. He stood way at the back by the beaded curtain, towering mournfully over the buffet. Gwen did not linger on his sweet, sad, pouchy eyes. They had brought in some kind of platform and shone a light on the killer B-3. Nat stood beside it, arms folded, as though to restrain it from further acts of violence. He arched an eyebrow in greeting and then returned his attention to an unknown old white man standing on the far side of the organ, in front of the Leslie. In an indefinite European accent, the old man was speaking earnestly to the crowd, talking about Mr. Jones’s political beliefs, of which Gwen (like most people in the room) had been ignorant until now. Red, as it turned out, as Cochise himself.

Aviva’s jungly head scarf caught Gwen’s eye, in the row by the front counter. Aviva was one of the people in chairs. She raised a hand to Gwen: There was an empty seat beside her. Gwen would have to take it. She knew that Aviva was angry, and knowing that was enough to make Gwen angry, too. But she was too pregnant to stand.

As Gwen worked her way into the crowd like an icebreaker shouldering the floes, Aviva picked up her purse, which she had been using to save the seat for Gwen.

“Who is this guy?” Gwen whispered into Aviva’s ear when she sat down. Aviva’s hair had a bay leaf smell.

“He’s from, I guess a Marxist library down the street.”

Gwen had been unaware, as well, that Telegraph Avenue featured a Marxist library. She tried to imagine it as a place that would feel congenial to a man who not only dressed the way Mr. Jones dressed but also understood, according to the fluty-voiced old Marxist librarian, the interactions of base and superstructure, the way ultimately, class struggle underpinned all the racism in America.

“That the Aztec number?” Gwen whispered, grasping for the first time the splendor of the corpse.

Aviva nodded.

“Shh,” said the woman on the other side of Gwen. She was a freaky-looking old Cruella with a brindle shih tzu perched on her lap.

“Sorry,” Gwen said to the scary old lady.

“Me, too,” Aviva said to Gwen immediately, as if she had been holding that for Gwen’s arrival as well.

Gwen considered correcting Aviva’s misapprehension that she had apologized for what Aviva had called her “performance” in the hearing at Chimes. But some impulse restrained her. It was not a qualm—far from it. Maybe it was the soft, snowy mantle of sleep under which she had passed the previous night, but she felt more justified than ever in taking on those tools of the insurance companies, more justified at having thrown Archy out of the house so that she could at last get some rest. It was not the possibility that she might have been wrong, excessive, manipulative, over the top yesterday afternoon, which led Gwen to let stand the misapprehended apology. It was pure calculation, albeit buried deep: Let Aviva think she had been apologized to; it would make things easier later.

After the man from the Marxist library, there was a gap-toothed drummer who looked older than he probably was, a hundred and ten in dope years, and then Moby got up and told a story about how the first time he came into Brokeland Records, Mr. Jones had been sitting at the counter in his usual spot, rewarding his parrot, Fifty-Eight, with sunflower seeds from his jacket pocket, trying to teach him, with a deck of playing cards, to recognize the difference between the red and black suits. “‘This bird smarter than anybody you know,’” said Moby, quoting Mr. Jones too faithfully, maybe, laying on as usual with the Ebonics. “‘He don’t learn how to play poker, just mean I didn’t give him a adequate schooling.’”

Most of the room broke up into laughter. Gwen looked over at the organ to see how Nat was taking the lawyer’s routine. She knew how much he detested the way Moby slipped into his wannabe shtick. And he was really ill equipped for it, there was no denying that. If he were not so sweet and fat with that preposterous swoop-back haircut, Gwen might have taken a measure of offense at the way Moby talked, the style cobbled (with unquestionably sincere intentions of tribute) from the discarded materials of rap records, Grady Tate on Sanford and Son, a touch of Martin Lawrence, and then at the core, something really questionable, maybe Morgan Freeman as Easy Reader on The Electric Company. It sure bothered the hell out of Nat, though, look at him up there, turned around on the organ bench, working the pedals of his irritation, shooting his cuffs. If you were trying to pass as white, the thing was always to keep your distance from your darker relatives, but if you were a white guy living along the edge of blackness all your life, the worst thing was somebody around you trying to do the same.

Having concluded his remarks, Moby worked his way back to his seat, free throws made, pounding and dapping folks right and left.

“Thank you, Moby,” Nat said from the back. Everybody craned around to look at him. “You would not be so fond of that bird if you owed him as much money as I do.”

He meant it as a joke, and Aviva laughed, but it came out sounding angry, and if Gwen were a detective investigating the bird’s disappearance, she definitely would have brought Nat in for questioning.

“I’m going to play a little now,” Nat announced, as if it were a procedure and he a periodontist. Making it sound like it was not going to be any fun for anyone. “And then Mr. Stallings is going to offer the eulogy.”

Gwen tried to remember the last time she had heard Nat call Archy “Mr. Stallings.” She turned to Aviva to see if she might have picked up on something amiss between their men, but Aviva had eyes only for Nat. She was sitting up and watching him as carefully as Flowers was watching the body in the casket: wanting him to be perfect.

Nat turned to the Leslie amplifier and honored it with a bow, snapped it on. It rose throbbing to life. A wind flowed through its mysterious antique machinery. Nat sat down at the Hammond that had taken, in every sense, Mr. Jones’s life. It was not Nat’s instrument, but he had a gift, could pick up pretty much any instrument and quickly figure it out well enough to fake it. He played piano, and Gwen assumed that his organ playing would resemble that: modernistic, angular, Monk-style stuff, hard to listen to.

Nat loosened his tie. He mediated a dispute among his shirttails, his waistband, his belt, and his ass. He fiddled with the drawbars and switches of the Hammond, more for the sake of ritual than precision. With a count and a duck of his head on four, he began to play. She recognized the song as the old Carole King number “It’s Too Late.” The organ had a reedy, bluesy sound, smoke in its throat. Nat did not fool around with angles and flatted notes. His feet stoked the pedals. She did not remember any of the lyrics apart from those of the chorus, though those were enough to convey the melancholy of the song. She wanted to look for Archy, but she was afraid that if their eyes met while this song was being played, he would think she intended to send the message that Carole King had been sending to the man in her song.

Part of her, call it most of her, knew that to some extent she had been playacting, licensed by her hormones to express through the theater of her departure and her return all the humiliation that Archy had forced her to endure. As Nat played, she avoided meeting Archy’s gaze and wondered if the sadness she had seen on his face was for her and him. Archy had decided to leave right after the funeral, she decided, his duffel bag and ten crates of records loaded into the back of his El Camino. She had thrown him out in pique, but now he would be leaving in earnest, just as she had always known and feared he would do. The certainty of his imminent departure came over her so strongly that she was confused by it and wondered if Nat had selected the music on purpose as a comment on her relationship with Archy.

Aviva leaned over and whispered into Gwen’s ear without taking her eyes off her husband. “This was Mr. Jones’s theme song,” she said. “According to Nat.”

Gwen understood then that whatever its ostensible subject or situation, “It’s Too Late” was about Cochise Jones. Lying useless in his casket. Sitting at the bedside of his wife when she had lain dying. The song was about the people gathered here who might never have had the chance to meet Mr. Jones, and those who might have spoken differently, said more, the last time they saw him, had they known. It was about Titus growing up with no father, and Aviva trying to hold on to her one and only baby, and the dream of Brokeland Records. It was about some large percentage of the aggregate wishes, plans, and ambitions espoused by the people gathered here today. Nat had not needed to choose “It’s Too Late” in order to comment directly on her situation with Archy. It was Mr. Jones’s theme song, and its sentiment was always appropriate.

“Perfect,” Gwen said.

“My name is Archy Stallings. All right, now. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Those of you, some of you who don’t know me, I am one of the co-proprietors of these premises, Brokeland Records, thank you, a neighborhood institution since, count it one way, twelve years, but really, you have to count back a lot further than that. For real. Back, like, before they had vinyl records, back before they even had Mr. Jones, and Mr. Jones was here a good long time. And I mean he was right here. Seriously. Right there, on that stool, where his picture’s looking at you, in prime form if I may say, got to love that Borsalino. Mr. Jones spent a lot of time and money at this address over the years, first when it used to be a barbershop. Spencer’s Barbershop, that’s right. I got my hair cut here quite a few times, I was a youngster. And then Mr. Jones spent even more of his money here, the past twelve years, buying records! A whole lot of records, from me and my partner, Nat Jaffe, who just now tore it up, am I right? Yes, I am. Tore it up on Mr. Jones’s signature tune, ‘It’s Too Late,’ thank you, Nat, for that.

“Now, if you talked to Mr. Jones for any length of time, and it took a long time to get anything out of Mr. Jones, man preferred to listen, witness, I bet most of you had no idea until this very afternoon, all due respect to Dr. Hanselius from the library, oh my goodness, Cochise Jones, look at you, dressing like that all the time, riding around town in your big old van with your gold toothpick, and all the time you secretly a Communist! Mr. Jones was like, almost like a father to me, used to pass me a little cash every now and then, kept an eye on me. Talked to me, and like I’m saying, that was, you know, it took an effort for him.

“Anyway, if you could drag it out of him, you found out sooner or later that Mr. Jones came here to Oakland from somewhere down in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, was it Slidell? Yes, when he was fourteen, fifteen. His dad got a job working at the cannery, the one where the DMV is now? The Lusk Cannery, yes. That is all long before my time. But Mr. Jones used to tell me things, you know, every so often the parrot would lay off talking, Nat there just about finished up with the daily rant, ha, ha, something used to bubble up out of Mr. Jones. About the neighborhood. Things he remembered. Coming up a little boy in Louisiana, hearing things from the old folks, some of those people went way on back, back up almost to slavery times.

“I don’t know how many black folks came up to Oakland from Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, you know, back at the time when Mr. Jones and his family came here. Many, many thousands, tens of thousands. Yeah, so, they left most of what little they had down south, but they brought the music they liked, going back to like Congo Square or whatever. Jazz and boogie, church music. And then getting off the train in Oakland, everything’s booming. That’s when, if you came inside here, you most likely would be hearing that rocking postwar blues, that jump music, coming out of the radio Eddie Spencer used to keep on this shelf behind me.

“You listen to that music now, like Joe Houston, it’s rock and roll, right? Same music. Joe Turner. And that’s the kind of music Mr. Jones started out playing in public. That and church music, and church music, that’s like, that’s the original rock and roll. I can tell, looking at his face, my partner has certain bones to pick with my theorizing on this subject, but hey, we did that roshambo and I drew the eulogy, so hang with me, all right? I think you are going to like where this is going.

“Yeah, so, when he was in high school, Mr. Jones had a band, they were all black kids, played rhythm and blues, Drifters covers. But he also used to play sometimes with a bunch of white boys, I think they were called the Pearl Tones, was that it? Based out of Skyline High. Even when he first got known, in like ’64, ’65, playing straight-ahead jazz, kind of following on the organ a little bit what Ahmad Jamal was doing on the piano, even then he never totally lost that rocking touch. I know it always used to, not bother him, but make him a little sad the way people sat around listening to jazz. To those Eric Dolphy joints he played on, people nodding a little bit, tapping their feet, but not, you know, not up jumping around, getting wild, the way black folks generally, historically speaking, have tended to do.

“Meanwhile, on the radio, Mr. Jones is hearing Jimi Hendrix, hearing Sly Stone. Not just white boys playing black music, like always, or even black dudes playing in a white style, but really, like, this moment, this one moment, lasted four, five years, when the styles and the players were mixing it all up. The Temptations, some of that late stuff is heavy in the true rock-and-roll vernacular. And Mr. Jones, he knew Sly Stone, they was even related by marriage somehow, he started working some of that same idea into the jazz that he started to play.

“And even though he never lost that smooth approach, that soft touch on the right hand, his left hand, ’67, ’68, it started to get extremely funky. But Mr. Jones didn’t call his style ‘funky,’ I don’t believe I ever heard him use that term at all. Church music, jump music, rock and roll, hard bop, soul-jazz, none of that. We get into a lot of, like, genre arguments around here, like, is Donald Byrd’s Street Lady soul-jazz, or is it more to the side of jazz-funk? Is ‘hard bop’ redundant? Mr. Jones never took part in those discussions. But one time, I do remember, he called what he played ‘Brokeland Creole.’

“Creole, that’s, to me, it sums it up. That means you stop drawing those lines. It means Africa and Europe cooked up in the same skillet. Chopin, hymns, Irish music, polyrhythms, talking drums. And people. Cochise Jones, his mother was mostly, uh, Choctaw, I think it was. Me, my father’s half Mexican, which is already half something else. Brokeland Creole. Around here used to be Mexico, before that, Spain, before that, Ohlone. And then white people, Chinese, Japanese, black folks bringing that bayou, that Seminole, that Houston vibe. Filipinos. Toss ’em on the grill, go ’head. Brokeland Creole. And some more Mexicans, Guatemalans. Thai, Vietnamese. Hmong. Uh, Persian. Punjab, Mr. Mirchandani. Mr. Mirchandani, here’s an example right here. All them good samosas back there, piled up next to the fried chicken? I— Yeah. I know I had a point I was going to make. Ha, seriously. Yeah, no, okay.

“Only that Cochise Jones— Oh. Excuse me. Whoa. No, I’m good. Mr. Jones was like a father to me, which I seriously needed. That’s one point. And the other point is, since I’m here doing this eulogy, I have a responsibility to have us, you know, take a look at the life the man led and, like, extract some kind of wisdom out of it. Right? So here goes.

“Seems like, I don’t know. When people start looking at other people, people not like them, one thing they often end up liking about those people is their music.

“There’s sort of a, what, an ideal that I know Nat and me always had in mind for this store. Not, like, anything we ever planned out or talked about. But it’s something like this: on the old Silk Road, you know, between Europe and China. It’s all tribes and deserts, and then you’ve got this long, hard journey, take you a couple of years to get there if you go quick. It’s a hard road, it has bandits, sandstorms. You carrying the light of all the civilizations back and forth, but all around you, the tribes just want to keep up their warring, and killing, and keeping track of what makes them better than everybody else. Like you know how every tribe’s name, when you translate it, turns out to mean ‘the people,’ like nobody else but them is really human? But you keep on because you are trying to earn a little cheese, right, and you spreading the collective wisdom back and forth. Forging that Creole style. And every so often, every few hundred miles, maybe, you got these oases, right, these caravansaries, where they all get together and chill, hang out, listen to good music, swap wild tales of exaggeration. Nat, man, you know what I’m saying, right? That was kind of our dream. The Brokeland Creole dream.

“Mr. Jones was a mainstay of this caravansary. He was, like, our idol in the corner, the household god. Now he is gone, and we, me and Nat— Whoa. Okay, yes, could I get that tissue, Aviva? Thank you.”

“You can ride with us,” a voice was saying, sounded like the undertaker. “Funeral can’t start without the deceased.”

In reply, only a silence, partial, intensified by the sounds of departure from the front of the store, chairs scraping, people offering rides, vouching for their own or somebody else’s sobriety. Burial-suit thugs from the funeral home handing out maps to the grave: Miss, a map?

Titus zipped his pants. The way to play it, saunter out of the bathroom into the workroom, alone. Kid coming out of the toilet zipping up his Levi’s, so what? He communicated his intentions to Julie by means of Special Ops hand signs: I, turn out light. You, stay. I, go, create diversion. You, count thirty, exit bathroom, slip out the back. Julie nodded: Understood. That turned out not to be the case, because the minute Titus switched off the light, Julie just went and opened the bathroom door. Eased it open, at least a show of stealth, half an inch, an inch.

Then the answer: “I’ll give you five minutes.”

His father. Archy. Tightness in his voice. Fronting. Bored with the undertaker, bored with using boredom as a front. Angry, tired.

Titus and Julie exchanged a look in the darkness: change of plan. The lonely science of eavesdropping, another mad love they shared. Two of Julie’s fingers keeping the door open that one little inch.

“All I need is five seconds,” the undertaker said. “To say you are the stupidest, most self-defeating negro I have ever seen. And my experience in that category is long and bitter.”

Archy said, “Let me save you the five seconds, then, ’cause I already know that.”

“How about this, then? You have played yourself now.”

“No surprise there, either.”

Archy was leaning against one of the rolling bin tables they had humped into the workroom that morning, his wide ass in those ugly black suit pants pinned against a corner of the Disco section. On the tab of the white section divider behind him were written, intriguingly, the words YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA. Titus briefly imagined the warm, candy-flavored music that might go by that name.

“I hope you were not counting on going to work for Gibson Goode anytime soon. Because as far you are concerned, Gibson Goode has moved on.”

Archy Stallings looked uncomfortable and unhappy, arms crossed, scowling, sharp corner of the record bin poking him in the ass. Maybe he was using the pain to focus himself, keep himself on his guard. Titus was not sure how loaded or sober the man was.

He had made his funeral speech, flowing all over the place, Indians, Vietnam, gumbo, Sly Stallone. At the end of his disquisition on what an undifferentiated mess life was to him, the man had choked up. In that instant, Titus had played a scene in his mind: The pregnant lady got up, put her arms around her baby’s daddy, he put his hand on the giant-size belly, and they decided that in the end, as long as life was going to be an undifferentiated mess, they might as well not fight it anymore. Make a place in the mess for a baby, a baby who would have a mother and a father, one small victory for the good kind of doubt and confusion over the bad. But in reality, when the movie in Titus’s mind came to an end, it turned out to be Julie’s father, Nat, giving Archy the hug of consolation. The box of tissues got passed around.

Then there was some drinking, for sure. Beer, wine, Cokes. People drank it all. They ate up the food, bum-rushed the buffet like freed prisoners, bees on a melting Popsicle. An hour later, it was all gone. A lone can of tonic water floated in a cooler, untouched among the ice cubes for quite some time, and eventually found its way into the company of a bottle of gin that never made a public appearance. The last Saturday afternoon of the summer went about its business, and it got to be time to ride on over to the cemetery, if you were going.

When the food was gone, the undertaker gave out instructions to his nephews and organized the procession to the cemetery, suggesting to some people that they let others do the driving, speaking in a kindly whisper far from the warlock voice he was using on Archy Stallings. Then the lid got lowered for the last time on Cochise Jones, and Titus played a scene in which he persuaded a few trusted confederates to join him in a heist operation to steal the clothes off the dead man before they were lost forever to rot and darkness and oblivion. Trap the hearse between a couple of tractor-trailers at an intersection, pull up in another hearse, switch caskets. Never let that beautiful thing, the Aztec number, go wasted in the ground. By the end of the scene he was cutting in his head, Titus found himself deep into creeping himself out, picturing a piebald cadaver rotting in the stainless leisure suit. Thing was made of space-age materials, no worm was ever going to touch it. Eternal as a Twinkie.

“So, you and he,” the undertaker was saying, “you are calling it quits. Is that what I am to understand?”

“I know you would be happy about that.”

“I would only be partway happy,” the undertaker said. “Which is the same as not happy at all.”

“We close the store, Nat’s bound to drop this whole protest thing. You won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

“Your friend already did his damage to me,” the undertaker said. “Now Rod Abreu has come sniffing around this whole deal, acting to the world like he is trying to eighty-six it. Letting Gibson Goode think he’s an enemy and needs to be kept close, as the saying goes. Needs to be won over. Right now, today, Rod Abreu is sitting at the Coliseum, letting G Bad pick up the tab for the nachos.”

Titus could not see the undertaker’s face, only the steely curl of the pompadour thing at the back of his head. But from the sound of his voice, he must be looking disgusted, contemptuous. It was an easy enough expression to imagine on the undertaker’s face.

“Tell me this,” he said, “if you close your store, curl up in a ball like a little pill bug, what are you going to do for a job to support your child?”

Only a second before, Archy had seemed fucked up, puzzled. He had this pudding look to his cheeks. Now it was all concrete and stone.

“I am going to see Mr. Jones on home,” he said. “And we ain’t finished doing that yet. I don’t need to ride with you. I have my own car.”

“Do you have a map to the gravesite? You’re going to need a map.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Mountain View, two hundred and twenty acres. Hundred and fifty thousand people buried there. Five, six funerals a day. You got the Jews in one place, Chinese over there. Black folks sprinkled all through it. Talk about Brokeland Creole. Mountain View Cemetery, that’s the only place you ever actually going to find it. But you need a map. You need guidance.”

“Oh, okay. You’re going all Jedi on me now.”

“Hear me out.”

“Going Morpheus.”

“You don’t deserve it, boy. But I am still willing to help you. We can get this mess straightened out. Luther has something I want. Nothing crazy, illegal, not drugs, guns, stolen goods, none of that. All right? Or yes, the thing was stolen, but it was stolen from me! It’s mine! I mean, seriously.” His voice broke, raspy almost to the point of a wheeze. “It’s mine, he has it, and I want it back. I have money, Luther’s broke. I figure maybe you’ve heard one or two things about me over the years that might have planted a seed in your imagination. When you are an undertaker and you come from a whole family of undertakers, people are going to hold all kinds of wild beliefs about the way you go about your business. So I want to reassure you. I don’t want to hurt Luther, do not want to mess with him, the Lord knows, Archy, I want nothing to do with that man any more than you do. That old boy wore me out a long time before he got around to wearing you out. I am a respectable businessman, I sit on the city council. I am not a gangster, and I know what people say about me, but it’s lies and rumors and folks letting their imaginations run away with them. One time when I was a young man, I made a mistake. A long time ago, right out of the navy. I made a mistake, but I was lucky, and one way and another, with some help from your father, credit where credit is due, I was able to put it behind me. Stopped running wild and acting a fool all the time. Got serious about life and settled down and did good for myself. Things did not go so well for your father. The whole time I was rising, he was sinking down. For the past ten, twelve years, he’s been coming around here, sometimes sober, most of the time so high or so drug-sick, he could not even really talk. But most of the time he managed to get his palm out, and I always crossed it with some cash for him.”

“He was blackmailing you.”

The undertaker didn’t respond to that. “Everything gets put where it belongs,” he said. “You can still find yourself standing behind the information desk in the Beats Department at the Dogpile store on Telegraph Avenue, dropping science on the youngsters when they stop in to pick up the new Lil’ Bow Wow, getting that employee discount to bring home one of those Baby Mozart DVDs, teach your new child to play the cello while he’s sleeping.”

“And I have to do what?”

“Son, I know you know where he is.”

“I honestly don’t.”

Crouched down in the bathroom with Julie leaning in over him, Titus heard the man lying. At the body shop, it had made him furious to see the contempt his father showed toward his own pops. Now Titus felt sorry for the dude, so twisted up with hate that he could not even let his poor, old kung fu ex-junkie daddy get paid back money he was free and clear owed.

“Have it your way, then,” the undertaker said.

For the first time, you could tell, Archy was thinking. Going back over it all. Making up his mind to do what he was going to do.

“I have no reason to want to enable that man,” he said. “And I have known you all my life, Brother Flowers. But I can’t help feeling like I’m seeing a side of you I never really believed was true.”

“Just conducting business.”

“Nah. You’re an undertaker. A mortician. Burying a dead man, supposed to be more than just business.”

“Well—”

“You never once told me, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. Mr. Jones was a fine man and a sharp dresser,’ or anything of that type.”

“Well, I am sorry,” the undertaker said.

But by that time, man was already on his way out the workroom door, headed for the cemetery and whistling “It’s Too Late.”

Look at this. Here the boys come out of the bathroom, Alfalfa and Stymie. The only thing missing, the little eye-patch pit bull. Both of them with their eyes wide, boy detectives, the black one saying nothing, the Jaffe kid all, We know where he is.

“You were eavesdropping,” said Chan Flowers. “That is wrong, morally and ethically. Every civilized people from the dawn of time has recognized that fact.”

“We didn’t mean to.” Julie, his name was, a girl’s name for a girlish boy. “We’re sorry.”

Flowers said the one thing there was to say to an eavesdropper. “What do you think you heard?”

Julie said they had not really heard anything, just that Flowers was trying to find Luther Stallings to pay him back the money he owed Luther. Also that, while they had been sworn to secrecy, they would be willing to act as messengers.

“Messengers? What do you mean, messengers? Why do I need a messenger? Can’t you just tell me where he is?”

The boys exchanged looks. Flowers was busy managing his impatience, a skill he had acquired without ever quite internalizing, but despite his irritation, he did not fail to detect a spark of genuine friendship between them. It astonished him.

“We heard there was maybe, some kind of”—the boy turned bright red—“uh, beef.”

Flowers asked Titus, didn’t he know how to say anything? “You two remind me of the old man and that parrot,” he said. “Frick and Frack.”

He glanced through the door, across the deserted store to the front door. Feyd and Walter, Bankwell waiting in the hearse. Time to start the parade.

“Fine,” Flowers said. “I tell you what.” He reached into his breast pocket for his checkbook. Then and there, leaning on a stack of records, he wrote out a check in the amount of $25,000.00, payable to Luther Stallings. Signed it with a flourish that he hoped implied magnanimity. “There is no beef,” he said. “That was all a long time ago and far, far away. You can tell him I said that. Bygones be bygones.”

“Forgiveness is an attribute of the brave,” Titus said.

Julie almost smiled, looking pleased and dubious. But Flowers recognized it as one of forty-nine Proverbs, Meditations, and Words of Comfort printed in the last two pages of every funeral program that Flowers & Sons handed out.

“I’m going to have to be careful around you,” he said, handing the check over to Titus. “I can see that. Here. You take that to him. Put it in your wallet. You carry a wallet, don’t you?”

No, of course he did not, just a dense wad of small bills. So Alfalfa put the check into a toy plastic wallet he carried around. Flowers waited until this business had been seen to, concerned about the fate of that check, which he had postdated and would cancel first thing Monday morning.

“That’s no strings attached, right? He doesn’t have to forgive me. It’s his money, he can do what he wants with it. Got that? We good? All right. Now, I know you boys want to ride with the body.”

Having laid aside their frogged jackets this once in favor of the drab and Day-Glo splendors of the Jones Memorial Leisure Suit Library, Bomp and Circumstance cut loose. They played “Nearer My God to Thee.” They played “The Old Rugged Cross.” Their order was good as they led the caravan along Piedmont Avenue to the cemetery gates. Perhaps the brass sounded a touch pallid, like the headlights of the cars in the cortege. Maybe the drumbeat got lost in the heat and hum of the afternoon. But once the casket had been fed by the belts into the ground, they turned from the graveside, the bass trombone taking up the opening groove of “Redbonin,’” which had gone to number thirty-two on the R&B charts in July 1972, and began, as promised, to swing.