Telegraph Avenue (29 page)

“I’d love to,” Flowers said. “Nothing would make me happier. Unfortunately, today I do not have the time. I’m just on my way from one appointment to another. Not even time to stop and browse the new-arrivals bin. Leave a little more of my hard-earned pay in that cash register over there.”

This got a bigger laugh than any Abreu had managed to scrape together from this crowd, admittedly, a tough Berkeley/Oakland crowd, its sense of humor reduced, like the sperm count of a man who wore his underwear too tight, by the heat of two dozen outraged brains. It occurred to Nat that Chan the Man appeared to be in fine form and might take it into his head to make a speech. Might even have come today prepared to make one. An address that would reach out to the core of
Nat’s
constituency: the soreheads of the neighborhood, the purists, the lovers of minutiae, the inveterate hearers of invisible bees. All gathered together in one room, to be scooped up into the stern but forgiving arms of Flowers. Delivered at one blow like the brave little tailor’s flies. Courtesy of Nathaniel Jaffe, let his epitaph be:
It seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Actually, I was just looking for you, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “If you’ve got a minute?”

It was an artless and genial question, and when the meeting resumed with a question from Dr. Milne about a peculiarity of Oakland zoning ordinances, no one paid it any mind apart from Nat, who happened to be looking at Archy when Archy, wary, unwilling, replied, “Yeah, you bet.”

I
n the cool penumbra of Chan Flowers’s office, Archy dropped into a wingback chair. It was big and soft as a grandmother, trellised cream chintz overwhelmed with pink roses. A chair for swooning in, for surrendering one’s dignity to, safe within the air-conditioned preserve of sympathy where, installed behind his desk, Chan Flowers received death’s custom with magisterial detachment, a gamekeeper crouched and watchful in a blind. Sweat cooled in cobwebs on Archy’s arms and forehead.

“Thanks for taking a minute, son,” Flowers said. “Didn’t seem to me you were necessarily involved in that mess over there.”

“Not necessarily,” Archy allowed. He fought the armchair, resisting its invitation to conform his frame to its armature of grief. Grief was itself a kind of chair, wide and forgiving, that might enfold you softly in its wings and then devour you, keep you like a pocketful of loose change. He found himself slouching in it, off-kilter, legs outflung, bare knees akimbo, covering his mouth with one hand like he was trying to bite back a smart remark.

“I thought maybe if it was convenient,” Flowers said, “you and I might have some details to go over for the funeral and all. One or two points that have come up in the fine print, so to speak.”

Archy nodded, already feeling some undercurrent in the conversation, this audience with the councilman, that he didn’t like. Bankwell and the other nephew, Feyd, stood guard at either side of the office door like a couple of foo dogs, too close to looming for Archy’s taste. They were the undertaker’s muscle, no doubt or question about that. At a funeral, if things turned unruly, a Flowers nephew might have to step in, keep the peace. If Flowers was burying a murder victim, somebody dropped by the logic of retaliation, if there was some history of blood and bad feeling abroad, a nephew might have to go strapped among the mourners. Bankwell and Feyd, in their copious suits, wore faces you could interpret as reflecting the tranquility of iron harbored at the hip. Archy remembered Bankwell obese and twelve, head too small for the rest of him, a neighborhood scandal after it was discovered that Bank had been getting his addled granny to pay him five dollars per book to solve her Dell Word Searches for her. Helping her to maintain her dignity, he claimed, so she could leave the books around her house with letters neatly circled, words crossed out. Archy wondered why Flowers felt that muscle was a necessary or desirable element for their rendezvous. He craned around to extend the nephews, by means of a bored slow stare, an invitation to go fuck themselves, saluting Feyd by hoisting his chin high. Feyd raised his own with an amiable coldness. He was reputed to be a tight and encyclopedic dancer, up on them all, from the Southside to turfing. Probably knew how to fight, too, did some capoeira, boy had that lean, springy
malandro
look to him. Bankwell, unquestionably, was grown to a very large size.

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

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

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

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

“Fine.”

“You were saying about Mr. Jones.”

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

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

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

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

“Thing is hell of ugly,” Feyd said.

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

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

“Naturally,” Archy said.

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

“How’s he look?”

“Now? Now he looks peaceful and dignified.”

“No sign of, uh, damage?”

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

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

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

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

“Fair enough.”

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

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

“He was deep, though.”

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

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

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

“I wouldn’t know,” Archy said.

“You haven’t seen him?”

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

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

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

“I might be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nope. No, sir, no, I don’t.”

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

“Yeah? What, a sea lion?”

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

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

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

Archy said, “I’ll think about it.”

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

“Is that right?”

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

“ ‘Community relations,’ huh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Living in a dreamland,” Bankwell suggested.

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

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

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

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