“You check out down here, I’ll go up,” Bank said. He had a feeling they would be on two.
It was not that he looked forward to trouble or violence. But he felt that it was better to rush up on it than to let it rush up on you. He rang his way up the steel stairs and was about to step onto the landing when somebody stuck out a leg. He fell hard. A lightbulb broke on his head. The stairway was a gong, resounding. While Bank was falling, though, he reached out to take instinctive hold of someone who turned out to be Titus. Shortie fell down beside him.
There was blood in Bankwell’s mouth, possibly a loose tooth.
“Motherfucker!” he said. Scrape against the concrete of the soles of his loafers as he reared up on his legs, flapping his necktie, flapping the tails of his jacket. Without intending to, he stepped on Titus’s stomach, and ho, shit, here came the bear claw, acrid brown slush in a jet. Bank jumped back, lost his footing, and then was attacked by a swordsman.
“Ya!” said the boy with the bunnies in his wallet. “Hiya!”
The first blow glanced off Bank’s right arm, just above the elbow, but the second caught him square on the back of the head. It was a practice katana, see them racked in a dojo, solid wood. Coming after Bank’s interaction with the concrete landing, the blow to his head did no favors to the clarity of his thought process. Luckily, he was armed with a fully licensed Sig Sauer .38 that he was more than qualified to use. Thinking was not required.
He stuck the gun in the face of little, what was it, Julie. Julie Jaffe. Five feet five inches of redhead Mr. Peabody samurai fury. Bank could not help smiling. “Check this out,” he said to Feyd when his cousin came running up the steps. “Check out little white-boy Zatoichi.”
Mr. Peabody lowered the sword, possibly because he now had two guns pointing at him and a sword made out of wood. But it looked more to Bank like amazement than surrender. More like Bank had guessed his secret identity. Bank twisted the sword free of the boy’s grip.
“Zatoichi!” Feyd said. “That’s good, I could use me a massage.”
Feyd looked down at Titus, saw what had become of the bear claw, wrinkled up his face.
“Look at you, bitch,” he said to Titus, who rose dripping to his feet, boy full of hateful thoughts he sent out his eyeballs toward Bankwell Flowers III. “What the fuck you do to yourself?”
“It’s okay. Okay, come on. Leave them alone.”
Bankwell turned to see Walter bringing up the rear of a short procession, the apex of a loose triangle whose remaining points were Valletta Moore and Luther Stallings with their hands up. Walter held the Beretta high and crooked, one-handed, in that movie style Uncle Chan abhorred.
“You found me,” Luther Stallings said, the old-school kung fu movie star, wiry and fit in a kimono, parachute shorts, pair of black cloth Bruce Lee slippers. Gray in his hair and chest fur, more lines on his face than Uncle Chan. “Put up the thumpers. Let me get my clothes on. Go on home, boys. I’ll be fine.”
Bank had seen, not recently, a movie or two with Luther Stallings in the lead. This was pretty much what he remembered: to the point, monosyllables, the lazy smile. So either this was acting, too, or there was no acting involved.
“Go ahead, Julie, Titus,” said Valletta Moore. “Boys, go on. You can go.”
“Fuck they can,” Bank said.
“It’s all right,” Walter said. “We got no room for them, anyway.”
While Bank was distracted by how stupid Prince Walter could be sometimes, Titus woke up. He grabbed hold of Julie’s shirt and dragged him down the stairs, four feet in sneakers chiming on down to the parking lot, sneakers against the blacktop.
“Dammit, Walter!” Bank said.
Now that he was thinking again instead of just doing, he made a futile show of going to the railing, weighing whether it made sense to take a shot at the runners. But it was only a show, and everyone knew it.
“It’s a hearse, you dumb-ass!” Bank said. “We could of fit Nell Carter in that thing, in a extra-large box.”
“Whatever,” Walter said.
“Kung Fu?” Luther Stallings said. He turned to take a closer look at his captor. Valletta Moore turned to look at him, too. “Kung Fu Bankwell!”
“Yo, what up, Mr. Stallings. How you been?”
Sheepish, Prince Walter underwent a headlock at the mercy of the old movie star. Valletta, though; the lady was not prepared to join in the warm and heartfelt reunion just yet.
“Walter Bankwell, Lord have mercy,” she said. “How did it ever come to this?” She lifted up her sunglasses to beam her most full-strength shaming rays at Walter. “Mixed up in this kind of fool behavior.”
“What I been saying to myself all day,” Prince Walter said. “Word for motherfucking word.”
In Archy’s last dream of the night, he was a youngster and yet also his present-day self, talking to his mother in an apartment of the 1970s. Mauve was healthy, no shadow hanging over her, and although he was dreaming, a part of Archy’s mind marveled at how much clearer and more present she seemed in this dream then she ever did when he tried, in waking life, to picture her. It was that type of dream—self-conscious, fathomable as you were dreaming it. All the pain and longing that had to do with his mother’s death, the untouchable spot lodged inside him like the black meteorite in the Kaaba, was palpable as he sat with her, making absurd conversation. As he dreamed, he understood that the conversation didn’t make any sense, that the dream was a form of grieving, with the passing of Mr. Jones acting as a trigger, an undercurrent. In the dream, it felt good to grieve. The record playing in the background of the dream apartment was a classic collaboration between Maceo Parker and Curtis Mayfield, the soundtrack from a well-known blaxploitation movie called Top Hat and Elbows. He listened to the beautiful music, fat beats, sunshine horns and shadow bass, and talked nonsense to his mom as she would always be. Thank goodness, thought his present-day self, I am having this wonderful dream.
Then the song playing in the background of the dream apartment, with its silver wallpaper, rolled slowly over into “Trespasser” by Bad Medicine. Archy woke up on the floor of the dead man’s house, stacked into a pile of moving-van blankets. He heard his phone ringing and knew that his mother was dead, and that Top Hat and Elbows would be a horrible title for a movie regardless of genre, and worst of all, that except in a vanished dream, there was no soundtrack album, no visionary collaboration between Maceo and Mayfield.
“Your phone,” said Kai. Supposed to be a lesbian, with that Bowser haircut and how she filled out the shoulders of her borrowed leisure suit, but at five in the morning—after they sneaked in through a basement window in the backyard of Mr. Jones’s house to let Kai, who turned out to collect gospel and Southern church music, hold a private listening party with Mr. Jones’s small but interesting selection of rare Savoy and Checker sides—the picture had turned out to be more complicated than that. “Yo, your phone.”
“What’s wrong?” Archy said into the phone.
“This is Julie.”
“Yeah, I get that. What’s wrong?”
“Okay, first of all, I know we totally messed up.”
“That’s first of all?”
Archy hauled himself with a wobble to his feet, hangover gumming up his inner gyroscope, and went to the dormer in the parlor. The sun fell in bars through the iron on the windows, and he slotted his eyes into a line of cool shadow and looked out at Forty-second Street. A peanut-butter-colored cat skulked, hunting, along a bed of nasturtium and blown newspaper. It was Sunday morning, August 29, 2004. The funeral was past. Today was the day he was sworn to get serious about his life.
“This has to do with Luther,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“Man, I thought I told you two, keep away from him.”
“Archy, they got him. They went into his room and they carried out his, you know, all his file boxes. And they took him. And then Valletta started to, like, she was kicking them and stuff. Not like some kin
d of Wing Chun roundhouse kick or something, just straight-up knee in their crotch, biting them and shit. So they had to take her, too.”
“Who?”
“Oh, and I hit this one guy with a sword.”
Titus came on, talking on top of Julie in a put-on voice like some old white chemistry teacher from Iowa. “That is a true story,” he said. “I can vouch for that.”
“Julie? Hit who with a sword?”
“Those guys from the funeral home. I think the big one is named Bank.”
Archy felt the sense of relief, or at least reassurance, that came with certain kinds of failure. Yesterday Chan Flowers had asked him to choose between his future—responsible dad working for an admirable employer with a good job doing what he loved—and protecting his no-account, pipehead, washed-up, full-of-shit, lying, smiling poor excuse of an absent father. Archy had walked out of the situation, which was a weak-ass way of choosing Plan B, for no good reason at all except some pathetic residual loyalty to the man who had done nothing but squirt some key proteins into his mother’s belly. And because, why not finally admit it, a man like Archy was never likely to go for a plan like Plan A. Come on. He was no better than Luther Stallings, and the theoretical loyalty to his father on display yesterday consisted of nothing more than that. Like so many kinds of masculine loyalty, it was really only a manifestation of cowardice. Now Luther was beyond protection, Archy’s lack of resolve having outlasted both Plans A and B, a proven technique otherwise known as Plan C.
“Where’d they take him?” he said.
“We don’t know. They had the hearse, so . . . yeah.”
“Okay. Where are you and Titus?”
They were at an Eritrean restaurant, way down Telegraph by MacArthur. They had cash and a phone. They knew how to get the bus back to the Jaffes’ place. Julie said they would definitely be okay, but Titus did get a bloody nose, plus he had vomited on himself, his nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it looked gross, and he smelled bad, and also he had a headache.
Archy had known Julie since he was not even two, from a little old man wringing his hands in a bouncy chair hanging in a doorway. Bouncing never did much good, but you could settle the kid right down by putting on the most Out shit you had on tap, the deepest kind of Sun Ra jazz-as-cosmic-background-radiation. Long as it was playing, little Julius would stop looking like he was about to be audited by the IRS and just sit there, watching the music like a cat watching ghosts. It was not hard for Archy to hear in his voice that the boy was freaked out.
“Are you going to call the police?” Julie said. “Or should we?”
Archy perched in his underpants on the windowsill. He looked at Kai in the bed, born a girl but not feeling it, maybe 50 percent of the way toward becoming a man. Still carrying all her reproductive organs of origin but unwilling to let Archy make use of them, asking him to please fuck her in the ass, nothing to ease the passage but a handful of spit. Kai was following a recipe, a series of steps: hormones, paperwork, surgery. And then one day she would wake up and be a dude, and in all likelihood, credit where it was due, a fairly dope one at that. Archy wondered if all the mental and emotional side of being a man flowed in with the hormones, like when you were digging in the sand and broke through to water. Maybe if you actively chose to be a man and followed all the prescribed steps and procedures, you would end up with some kind of clear convictions and never find yourself, say, walking out as a weak-ass way of implementing some dumbshit Plan B that you hoped would simply expire before you had to go through with it.
“Stay where you are,” he told Julie. “I’ll see to Luther and Valletta, have your dad come get you.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Okay. Just, yo, don’t tell my mom?”
“Promise you’ll never say ‘yo’ again.”
“I swear.”
Archy sorted out and put on his sour shirt and funeral suit, cupped water at the bathroom sink, tried to ignore the lunar ruin of his hair. Patted the hip pocket of his jacket.
“I took your keys,” Kai said. “Your car is parked by the store.”
“Thank you,” Archy said. Something else from one of the short night’s vivid dreams bobbed at the surface of his memory. “Right.” He rummaged through Kai’s leisure suit and came up with his keys. She had pulled the moving-van blankets up to her chin. Her small brown eyes were watching him. “I have to go.”
“Sounds like it,” she said.
“Are you okay?”
“Um, ow?” She sat up, uncovering her wide mouth, those smart-ass lips. “Good luck in Belize.”
“Yeah—what?”
The bobbing memory surfaced. Driving by the house on the Street of Lost Toys in the indefinite time after the lights came on at the Lakeside Lounge. Gwen standing on the front porch in her robe, silent as an idol to be robbed of its forehead ruby. Archy telling her to get out the way, grabbing a suitcase from the hall closet. Shoving all kinds of miscellaneous belongings in there, cans of tuna, probably a bra. Belize!
“Yeah, uh, thanks for getting me out of there in one piece.”
“Oh my God, I’m so fired. Gwen was pissed.”
“Yeah, I’m, uh, I’m sorry.” He glanced around the room one last time, then nodded goodbye, wishing he had a hat to cover the abomination of his hair, all shoved up to the front of his head. “As of now, okay, like two, three hours from now, I’m out of the picture.”
“In Belize.”
“I got all the maps.”
The eyes, the snarky mouth. Disappointed in him. Thinking he was better than that. “Have fun,” she said after a pause.
“Huh,” Archy said. “Not what I thought you were going to say.”
“What did you think I was going to say?”
“ ‘Man up.’ ”
“Fuck you.”
He took her yacht-captain hat out of the grocery bag she was using to carry around her discarded band uniform. “Yo, can I borrow this?”
“Keep it,” she said. “It looks stupidly good on you.”
Archy walked down to Telegraph in the L. Ron Hubbard hat, flipping open his phone, thinking about Julie’s question. First thing Aviva was going to say: Call the police. Tell somebody, don’t keep it a secret. Silence equals death. Take back the night. Aviva had been trained by bitter experience, like a lot of women doing the kind of work she did, to go by the book. Same with Gwen, her family packed with cops and lawyers; she would almost always throw in on the blue side of a question. Neither of them understanding that Chan Flowers would be only too happy to have the police in the mix. He was a city councilman, chair of the Public Safety Committee, tight with a lot of OPD captains and brass. When they died, patrolmen, firefighters, Chan Flowers buried them gratis, with somber pomp universally commended. The police would always be there to protect Chan Flowers. Once the man got back whatever Luther had taken from him, it would be full-on Patch me through to McGarrett, motherfucker. After that, you could tell the story of what happened when OPD met the sad old ex–kung fu champ blackmailer, and at the end of that story, in the way of the aptly named criminal justice system, it would probably be the woman, poor lost-tooth Valletta, who might have tried to be a mother to Archy if Luther had been willing to let her, who ended up doing the time.
That was something Aviva could surely understand, but Archy had no time to explain. He was reasonably certain that Chan Flowers would not endanger his position and reputation by doing anything to hurt Luther, have a couple Flowers boys curb-stomp him out behind the mortuary, but then again, within the shroud of power and funereal dignity, something internal to Chan Flowers was still on fire. Maybe the odd exemplary curb-stomp was the exact means men of position and reputation employed to stay that way.
“He around?”
“He is,” Aviva said, a warning in it. “How are you, Archy?”
“Gwen’s there?”
“Right here in my kitchen.”
That was good, in a way; Gwen could sit there saying, Fuck
it, I can have a damn cup of coffee if I want to, calling down curses on Archy’s head, finding the strength at long last in the cheerful kitchen of her best friend to do what she ought to have done so long ago, see Archy for the feckless showboat he was. Brewing up the Peet’s in that fancy French cyclotron coffee drip of Nat’s while they handicapped divorce lawyers, Aviva naturally pushing the do-it-yourself model, talking about how you can go on down to that Nolo Press on Parker Street in Berkeley, they have all the forms and books you need. Frigid weather had obtained between the women lately, and something like this was all they needed to thaw things out. Meanwhile, Nat could slip out the door without attracting too much attention, too many questions.
“You hearing all the dumbshit things I got up to last night?”
“Probably not all,” Aviva said. “Enough.”
“So can I get with Nat?”
“What?” Nat said when he came on the line, the sulk laid on thick so one might think it was for show, but Archy knew that sulking was a gift Nat could not control, the lonely gift of Achilles in his tent.
“You have to drive to that Eritrean restaurant on Telegraph, the one down by MacArthur, pick up the boys, they’re waiting for you there. Okay?”
“You can’t be serious.” Deep in that dive helmet of his, down in the Yap Trench with his lead-soled boots. “I’m in my underpants.”
“I know Gwen’s loving that.”
“Eat me.”
“I got to run, Nat. You know the place, we went there that time.”
In a few blocks, Archy came upon his car. Last night’s madman suitcase was still in the truck bed, half hidden under the furniture blanket. Furniture blankets, motif of the day. Symbolizing nomadism, impermanence, the need to coat yourself against the damage of transit. He pulled back the blanket and looked at the old blue plastic Samsonite, blinking away a few more jump-cut memories from last night, at the house, him doing all the yelling, Gwen not saying a word, eyes measuring him, seeing him for what he was, loud and drunk and fixing to leave. Three thousand seven hundred and fourteen dollars in the Brokeland Records account at Wells Fargo. Draw it out. Get in the car, start driving, 680 to the 5 to I-10, turn south at Tucson into Mexico. Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Veracruz. Hit Belize in three, four days. Find a hammock and a breeze, eat tacos made with the meat of some large jungle rodent. There was nothing a man couldn’t do with three thousand dollars and a suitcase full of canned tuna fish and pregnancy brassieres. The car was called an El Camino for a reason.
Telegraph Avenue: A Novel Page 44