Telegraph Avenue: A Novel

by Michael Chabon

  As he started across the sweep of pavement toward the zeppelin, he tripped some kind of sensor. Stanchions studded with floods lit up all around the airship, snapping it on like a neon sign. Nat fell back into shadow and waited to see what happened. Expecting to find himself confronted by a Bronco full of security guards, an android sentry equipped with lasers, a lonely old night watchman named Pete or Whitey who would leap up from his chair, already halfway to cardiac arrest, as the latest Field & Stream tumbled from his lap.

  Nothing. Most of the light from the stanchions was squandered on the gasbag, or whatever it would be called on a zeppelin—the word “envelope” slid in through a slot in his memory—but Nat thought he could make out a few small buildings over on the far side of the asphalt field. Maybe Gibson Goode and his entourage were asleep inside that glossy plastic gondola. It was not hard to imagine somebody in that crew feeling obliged to bust out with a gun and take a few shots at the intruder. Nat wondered if he ought to be afraid. But no light came on in the windows of the gondola.

  The zeppelin floated three or four feet off the ground, lashed at the nose to a steel mast that rose in turn from the wide bed of a parked truck that looked small next to the airship but must in fact be massive. The airship lay perfectly still, as if listening for Nat. The breeze off the bay did not appear to trouble it. Yet at the same time it thrummed, verging on some kind of outburst of motion. It reminded Nat less of a whale now than a Great Dane or a thoroughbred horse. An animal strung with nerve and muscle but, for all that, lovable.

  “Poor thing,” he said to the zeppelin.

  He came out of shadow and went over to the truck, across whose grille in chrome letters ran the weighty inscription M • A • N. The mooring mast was a business of telescoping poles, like the arm of a cherry picker without the elbow. As Nat drew closer, the mast chimed deep inside itself, and the breeze sang along the length of guy wire that held the zeppelin fast. The truck was meant, from the ground up, to be climbed. At the back, three steel steps led up the bed, and then you scooted around the base of the mast to the bottommost of a column of metal spikes or cleats, like the steps on the side of a telephone pole, which led up the lower segment of the mast to a narrow steel ladder, which in turn carried Nat all the way to the top.

  Here his lingering intoxication, and maybe a touch of loopiness from the collision, contended against his desire to set the noble zeppelin free. He spent awhile clinging to a cold rung at the top of the mast. He reached a hand, palm outward, fingers spread, like a man feeling for the kick of a child in a woman’s belly. In the instant before contact, he recalled having heard that a static discharge had ignited the Hindenburg. But there was no spark, only the cool taut bellying of the airship against his palm. He wished wildly for an ax, a pair of shears, a torch to cut the cable. Then he noticed a heavy lever on the shaft of the mast, alongside the spinneret from which the cable emerged, helpfully labeled EMERGENCY RELEASE. He opened the clasp that held it in place, snaked his shoeless feet around the poles of the ladder, and dragged down on the release, wrestling its rubber grip with both hands. The lever shunted out and down, and with a whistle of steel against steel, the guy wire whiplashed loose of the mast and swung from the big carabiner that clipped it to the airship’s nose.

  “Go ahead, Arch,” he said, perhaps uncovering the source of the sudden flood of tenderness he felt toward the zeppelin. “Fly and be free.”

  The zeppelin disdained his gesture of liberation. It continued to hang, drifting minutely, almost invisibly, three or four feet off the ground.

  “Ballast,” Nat inferred. “Right.”

  He climbed down the mooring mast, dropped to the ground, and took a slow walk around the gondola, looking for something to release, a system of weights, bags of sand like in The Wizard of Oz. There was nothing. He sat down on the ground, abruptly tired, and looked up at the gondola’s underside. There were two round hydrants, sealed with caps. Modest red capital letters identified them as ballast tanks. Nat reached up, went on the tips of his toes, and got hold of one of the caps. He got just enough purchase on tiptoe to pop it loose. The cap tore loose of his fingers. He felt himself hammered by something cold and implacable that turned out to be a hundred gallons of water. The shock of the water sobered him at once, enough to drench him in an equal or greater quantity of cool, clear regret for what he had done, as the zeppelin, with appalling grace and lightness, took to the luminous night sky.

  “How did you get home?”

  “Walked. Found a cab.”

  “You just left the car there?”

  “I now realize the folly of that.”

  “That’s how the cops found you. From your registration.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Oh, Nat.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “You stole the damn Dogpile blimp.”

  “Liberated,” he suggested, but he knew that in all its long history, the word had never sounded more lame.

  “Where is it now?”

  It occurred to him that a grave and narcissistic fallacy lay at the heart of the fear that he was going to look out the window of his house or Gwen’s car and catch sight of the zeppelin. The zeppelin would not be stalking him. It was mindless, trafficking only with gravity and wind.

  “Up in the sky?” he suggested.

  “You hope! Let me ask you a question. When the police called? Can I ask why you did not immediately confess?”

  “Panic? Shame?”

  “Nat, the thing could crash into the Transamerica Pyramid, the Bay Bridge.”

  Privately, Nat wondered if a celebrated giant landmark was more attractive to catastrophe than, say, an egg farm or a Best Buy. “Maybe,” he said, wishful, “it’ll just keep going up. Right on into space.”

  They were a few blocks north of MacArthur, and here came Merkata on the left. It was clad in fake half-timbering and stucco with a concrete thatched roof, leftovers from the day, three or four cuisines ago, when it had been a fish-and-chips joint.

  “If you want to pull over,” he said, happy to change the subject, “I can go get them.”

  “Here they come.”

  “Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”

  The boys came shuffling out of Merkata like prisoners chained at the ankle. Curtis & Poitier, brothers in woe. Something weighing on them, the burden of captivity, their secret escape plan. Julie clutching that portable eight-track to his chest with a weird, splay-fingered fierceness. Nat got out of the car, remarking the boys’ sheepish and hangdog expressions, wondering if maybe he needed to prepare his angry-dad routine. If he had it in him right now to do that; not to mention, given the events of last night, a moral leg to stand on.

  “Julius Lawrence Jaffe, what did you do?”

  He was shocked by the influx of his son into his arms. The bony shoulders, the soft lank hair against his cheek. Shocked by the tears that wetted the front of his shirt.

  “Pop, I broke my tape player,” Julie said.

  Disconsolate. Going slack against Nat like one of those little wooden puppets when you pushed the button in the base.

  “It’s okay, buddy,” Nat said. For all the loneliness and anger, for all the stupidity and shame, for all the pain that losing Archy, the store, the vision that Brokeland had always—exactly like Archy said in his eulogy—represented to Nat, with a warrant out for his arrest on a charge of zeppelin rustling, and the possible destruction of the Bay Bridge or, who knew, the Sphinx, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, on his conscience; right then, with his little boy restored sobbing to his embrace, it honestly did feel okay. This was something useful, maybe the sole useful thing, that he still knew how to do. “Let’s go home.”

  Julius nodded, then looked up into Nat’s face. “Titus, too?”

  “Sure, of course. Titus, you okay? Oh, Jesus, look at you, what happened?”

  There was blood on Titus’s face, his shirt collar, and something else staining his shirt. His eyes were wide and shining, about to well over, and his expression was
yearning as he watched Julius crumple into Nat’s arms. Standing there, blood on him, no one to hold or be held by. Looking at him, Nat felt ashamed. He opened his arms to make room in the embrace for Titus.

  Titus shook his head once, disgusted, cool returned. Then he turned and ran away.

  “Titus!” Julie called after him. “Pop, come on! Titus!”

  He started to drag himself loose, but Nat held fast, and after a brief struggle, Julie gave up and turned to Gwen in the car, watching them.

  “We have to go get him,” Julie said. “Gwen, let’s go.”

  “I really don’t think he wants to be around us,” Gwen said. “And I need to go in and talk to these folks about something.”

  There was no suff on the menu, but an understanding was reached, and after a brief wait and some blender activity, Gwen was able to allay this unlikely pain at last. She took the tall clear plastic tumbler filled with what Nat understood to be the thin beige milk of roasted sunflower seeds and tipped it to her lips. The joy and sweetness of it on her face, the orgasmic flutter of her eyelids, was stark, arousing.

  “Oh, baby,” she said.

  But then the weird-looking infusion seemed to go down badly.

  “Excuse me,” she said. She put her long and beautiful fingers to her lips, opened her eyes wide, closed them again, and ran to the front door of the restaurant. Out on the sidewalk, she bent double and spasmed, making a sound that Nat would never afterward be able to unhear, a kind of robotic braying, over and over. Nat, an atheist, prayed for it to stop. It sounded like her stomach was tearing itself in two. When she returned, her cheeks and forehead were lustrous with sweat.

  “Wow,” she said. She breathed, and swallowed, and breathed again. When she opened her eyes, Julie passed her a napkin, and she dabbed her lips with an improbable daintiness. “Thank you, baby.”

  She stood still, scowling, as if listening for something, probing a tooth with her tongue, trying to remember whether she had left a burner lit on the stove at home. And then Nat smelled something that reminded him abruptly of Cochise Jones’s basement. That cheese-cellar whiff, faint as a whisper, of rot. A darker shade of black seeped across the front of Gwen’s stretchy black leggings.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said with a chilling show of cheeriness. Her progress toward the bathroom was slow, her waddle exaggerated by the need to keep her legs apart. Behind her, splashes of water marked her passage. When she came out, she had pulled off her leggings and apparently disposed of them. The sight of her bare legs, emerging from the tails of one of Archy’s shirts, came as a shock to Nat. She looked vulnerable, and he understood that she was about to set out for a place, come what may, where she would be completely alone, so much more alone than an existential drama queen like Nat could possibly imagine.

  “You need to get me to the hospital,” she said.

  With Valletta gone—beyond the reach of X-rays, uplinks, and his unquenchable thirst for an audience—old Luther had lost his defiant aspect. He sat shifting in his chair as if it were greased or electrified, not meeting Archy’s eyes. Eyebrows arching, lips moving, telling Flowers to go fuck himself, saying nothing out loud. A whole great big argument going on there, inside his mind. A knife fight, a televised debate, a sumo match.

  “Your father,” Flowers began. He paused, ordering his next words, putting them through their paces before he set them loose in the room. “Your dad has been trying to blackmail me,” he went on, keeping his tone light, amused by the idea. “Over something that happened a long time ago, that no one even cared about at the time, to somebody no one remembers. Been skulking around from rathole to rathole. Leaving scurrilous messages. Spreading scandal and lies.”

  “Scandal, maybe,” Luther said. Shake of the head, going jowly, trying to match his old friend’s affectation of amusement with a show of moral severity every bit as unconvincing. “Not lies.”

  “Naturally, I have a problem with this behavior,” Flowers went on, ignoring Luther, making his case directly to the appointed mediator, who was already five minutes past regretting having gotten mixed up in this shit in the first place, even though he knew that the choice not to get himself involved would, in the end, have proved just as big a pain in the ass. “But given the nature of the accusation, I haven’t felt—yet—that it would necessarily help clarify the situation to call in my good friends at OPD.”

  “I hope you do,” Luther said. “I would love to tell them all about you.” He looked around, seeing if somebody might give him a high five, pound his fist. But it must have been looking right then like a pretty tough room.

  “Let him say his piece,” Flowers suggested to Archy, speaking through the interpreter, “after I say mine.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Archy told Luther.

  Luther shrugged, clapped one of his big paws to his mouth, Black Bolt holding back a fatal syllable. Scattered his limbs farther and looser in his chair.

  “Even though I have been tied up with a number of other important matters,” Flower said, “I’ve also been trying to dig this man up out of whatever hole he was hiding in so I could bring him here, sit him down in front of me, and make him at least look me in the eye while he was trying to shake me down.”

  “Here I am,” Luther said, knitting himself together, sticking out his jaw, as if being here were all his idea, a man of integrity walking the lonely path of truth and honor. When really he had been turned over like a worm on the blade of a trowel. “And I ain’t threatening you with nothing, Chan. What did I ever say, what note or message did I ever leave, besides, basically, the gist was, if you don’t want to help out your oldest friend, a man who been working so hard to clean himself up and get himself back on his feet, what’s that say about you? Which,” turning to Archy, “is more or less the message I been trying to convey to you, too.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Archy said. “Convey all you want, I’ll stamp it ‘Return to Sender’ every motherfucking time.” He turned to Flowers. “This is about that dude that got shot back in the seventies? Do I have that right? At the Panther bar, what was it, the Bit o’ Honey.”

  “His name was Popcorn Hughes,” Flowers said. “He was a gangster, a cheap, ignorant, worthless East Oakland pimp. Wound up right where he was supposed to, a year, maybe two, ahead of schedule.”

  “And you’re the one who hurried him along.”

  “I had no reason to want to hurt the man,” Flowers said carefully.

  “He was trying to make his mark,” Luther said. “ ‘Establish the legend.’ Impress Huey Newton. See, Huey, when he wants somebody gone, he knows all he has to do is wish it out, loud and clear. Like Peter O’Toole, what’s that movie?” Arranging his features into a kingly scowl, busting out a fairly respectable O’Toole. “ ‘Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?’ Chan the Man’s standing right there to make old Huey’s wish come true.”

  It was not easy to read the face of Chandler Flowers. He had long since, years ago, composed its features with the same care that he had brought to interweaving the dead fingers of Cochise Jones. If you were telling him a joke or a sad story, he would smile as need be or incline his head in sympathy. Mild amusement, ready understanding. Archy had never seen anything in that unreadable fist of a face like he was seeing now. It might have been pain or regret. Maybe it was only wistfulness. His eyes were a pair of shadowy tunnels boring deep into the mountain of the past.

  “ ‘Establish the legend,’ ” he said almost fondly. “That does sound like me at the time. I will give you that.”

  “Ready, willing, and able to do whatever you needed to do, not to have to end up right where you are now. Whatever was the opposite of this.” Luther opened the compass rose of his right hand to direct their attention to the zones of irony all around them. “The opposite of what Chandler the Second wanted you to do. Shining on going to college. Dating white girls. Enlisting in the navy as a common seaman. Joining the Black Panther Party.”

  Flowers crinkled his eyes with pleasu
re, enjoying the memory of the industry he had shown in scandalizing his father. He started to laugh, a scattering of droplets on a hot skillet, sounding like his nephew Walter. “That is the truth,” he said. “You got that right.”

  “Trying to give your old man a epileptic seizure,” Luther said, keeping a straight face around the edges of which laughter leaked like light around a door. “Infarction of the heart.”

  “I did my best,” said Flowers.

  “ ‘You’re a stain on the name!’ ” Dusting off, like an old side of vinyl, the tight-assed, stuffy-nosed voice of some long-dead black man, putting it on. “ ‘Chandler Bankwell Flowers, you are a stain on the name!’ ”

  “A stain on the name, good God, I totally forgot he used to—”

  “Surprised you never tried turning faggot,” Luther said. “That would of done it real quick.”

  The silence that followed this declaration, while nanometric, was abrupt and revelatory.

  “Uh,” Archy said, feeling his cheeks flush, but Flowers’s face had resumed its folded-hands composure. “So, what, were you both in the Party, or . . . ?”

  “Nah, that was his bullshit,” Luther said. “I didn’t want no part of that business. I just went along for the ride.”

  “Oh, yeah, okay. Because you are so opposed to bullshit,” Archy said. “You and bullshit, strangers to each other.”

  “It was all a long time ago,” Flowers said, and in his voice there was a nasal, seddity echo of Luther’s impersonation of Chandler the Second that had, Archy realized, been there all along. “Water under the bridge.”

  “Yeah?” Luther said, playing with the man, enjoying the company, Archy would have said, of his old running buddy. “Why you still so worried, then?”

  Placid, leaning back, hands folded over the convexity of his abdomen in a weird echo of the way he posed his dead men, Flowers said, “I’m not worried, Luther.”

  “Then why’d you change your mind about Dogpile? All of a sudden. The minute I go around, pay a visit to Gibson Goode, suggest that he ask you what happened to Popcorn. How come you threw in with Dogpile, then?”