Telegraph Avenue (46 page)

“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 .

T
he 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.

“Y
ou 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.