Telegraph Avenue

by Michael Chabon

  “I’d like to hear the answer to that one,” Archy said.

  Flowers just smiled that unreadable smile, forged in the fire of a hundred sessions of the Planning Commission, people popping up all around Hearing Room number 1 to ask the unanswerable, demand the undeliverable, give vent to the unassuageable.

  “I told you my reasons, Archy, the other day when we spoke. I realized that however much personal love and loyalty I might feel toward that beautiful store of yours, not to mention all the history it contains—black history, Oakland history, neighborhood history, my history—it was selfish of me to oppose Mr. Goode. A Dogpile Thang is an opportunity for the community as a whole. Now. Today. In the present moment. Not to mention, and now I’ll be honest, an opportunity for some people near and dear to me, too, such as my sister Candida’s youngest son, my nephew Walter, in all his rack and ruin. An opportunity for people such as yourself, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “Now, that is truly some bullshit,” Luther told Archy. “Chan, you knew this thing with Popcorn was going to come back on you someday. From the day you settled your ass down, followed in the footsteps, started pumping that formaldehyde, you been living in dread it would come out.” He turned to Archy. “I got evidence, son. DNA.” It was his turn to lean back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, flapping the rooster wings of his elbows. “Shit lasts a million years. Put it under a microscope, clone yourself a damn triceratops. One day, check it out, some Jurassic Park motherfucker’s going to come along, clone Chan Flowers for a prehistoric Oakland ride, Chan be standing there when Laura Dern goes by in her Jeep. Shit, Chan, I bet I can even lead them to the gun! That Mossberg’s probably still there in the woods, tangled up in some weeds and shit.”

  “You’re in the weeds right now,” Flowers said. “Way out in the weeds, Luther.”

  “What do you have?” Archy said.

  “A glove,” Luther said. “Chan was wearing it when he did Popcorn Hughes, has Popcorn’s blood DNA all over it.”

  “A glove,” said Flowers.

  “You remember, it was your brother’s, Marcel’s. Little purple glove from the costume he was wearing—”

  “A glove!” Flowers enjoyed or pretended to enjoy the idea that an accessory, a minor item of haberdashery, could ever inspire the kind of anxiety that Luther had described. “A glove, been in some crackhead’s back pocket thirty-one years? Even if it turned out to be real,” wanting Archy to come in with him on scorning this one, “I mean, even if the blood on this glove turned out to be mine, or Popcorn Hughes’, or Jimmy Hoffa’s, what does that prove?”

  Here it came, bright and true as a streaming banner: the smile of Cleon Strutter, showing his hand.

  “Just give me a hundred thousand dollars,” Luther said, “we never need to answer that question.”

  “Luther, for real?” Archy said. “Blackmail?”

  Tossing the word across to his father like a grappling hook, feeling one small barb catch hold. Luther looked down at his feet in their slippers, then up at Archy. Nodding. Good with it. “If you want to call it that,” he said.

  “It’s true, you really clean and sober?”

  “Thirteen months, one week, and five days,” Luther said.

  “For, like, honestly, the first time in, since, what, the late eighties?”

  Luther allowed that was probably accurate.

  “So this is the real you, then. That right? Luther Stallings, clean and sober: a scumbag blackmailer.”

  The flag of Luther’s smile failed, then caught a fresh breeze and streamed freely.

  “I’m just trying to make a movie, son. Revive my fortunes. Maybe that seems like an impracticable plan to all y’all cynical motherfuckers, don’t have dreams of your own. I guess I’m sentimental. Foolish. I just thought maybe my oldest, longest friend might want to help me out.”

  “Help you again,” Flowers corrected him. “Archy, he’s been trying to blackmail me on this alleged murder for years. It is not a recent phenomenon linked to sobriety.”

  Archy picked up that bit about alleged murder and worked it like a smooth stone in the palm. He went back over the conversation so far, trying to remember if Flowers had admitted to or acknowledged any wrongdoing at all. He didn’t think so.

  “Help me again,” Luther conceded. “On a grander scale. Basically,” he told Archy, “what happened, see, I had kept the glove the night of the killing. I don’t know why. Just held on to it like a souvenir of, you know, wild times. A few years down the road, when I got deep into the deepest badness of my life, and I’m not proud of that, I know I let you down, everyone down, but, uh . . .” Losing the thread, picking it up again. “I went looking for the glove. Thinking it might be, like they say, fungible. But it seemed like I had lost it somewheres, moving around all the time, in and out of jail and whatnot. Then I hooked up with Valletta again. Right after I got out of rehab. Turned out she had the thing all along.”

  “So, Mr. Councilman,” Archy said. “Do you want this glove Luther has?”

  Chan Flowers spoke slowly, through his teeth, as if it killed him to have to admit it. “I might,” he said.

  “And let’s say, for whatever reason, Luther doesn’t give it to you, what are you going to do?”

  The answer to this question was even slower in arriving, but when it did arrive, it appeared to cause him little pain. “I have more to lose than Luther does,” Flowers said.

  “Oh, I see,” Archy said. “Going with cryptic but scary. And what about me, now that I know about the glove, too? Do you have more to lose than I do?”

  “You aren’t ever going to blackmail me, Archy. I know that. It’s not in your nature. You must have got your mom’s strength of character.”

  “Let’s don’t bring her into this, all right? I’m glad she never lived to see this sorry day.” He dared his father to challenge this assertion, and Luther quietly let it go by. “So, then, what?” Archy said. “If I promise not to say anything, then you just going to kill Luther over this but not me?”

  “I deal in dead people every day of the year,” Flowers said. “Remember that. And I am looking to find a little security in these uncertain times. Whatever form that security might take.”

  Archy wondered where the glove was right now. Luther must have it salted away someplace, stashed with some lowlife, some ex-cellie of his. Taped inside a toilet tank, inside a Ziploc bag. The thing to do, he thought, just get hold of it somehow. Take it to the police, let them decide the outcome. It might lead nowhere, point to nothing, incriminate no one. Or it might be the end of Councilman Flowers and, quite possibly, the Dogpile plan.

  “If I walk out of here right now,” Archy said to Flowers, “leave this asshole to your ministrations—and I think we are all familiar with the quality of the work y’all do here—you say, you are going to trust me on this.”

  “I do trust you, Archy. I respect you, and I know you would never disrespect me. You walk out of here, I will personally guarantee to make sure you and that little family you got on the way are well taken care of as long as I’m around. You just go with an easy mind. Let me and Luther settle this thing out.”

  “So, for instance,” Archy said, “how about, would you back me up at Brokeland? Because, I mean, once our friend G Bad doesn’t have anything to hold over your head anymore . . . assuming you, uh, obtain this famous glove. In return for me keeping quiet.” As he said this, a rotor began to whirl in the Leslie cabinet of his chest. “Maybe you could, say, withdraw your support for the Dogpile Thang. Come back over onto the side of Nat and me? Because, you know, in our own small and modest way, we’re good for the community, too.”

  “I will do better than that,” Flowers said. “I will truly back you. As a silent partner. Pay down your debt for you. Get your creditors to step off, whatever it takes.”

  “I have to say, that sounds very attractive.”

  “Archy,” Luther said. “Son, come on.”

  “And all I got to do, let me get this straight,
is walk out of here. Leave you and him to, uh, was it, ‘settle this out’?”

  “That’s all,” Flowers said. “Of course, you have to remember, if it ever turns out to be the case the police do take an interest in this old unsolved crime? You might wind up being charged as an accessory after the fact.”

  Archy stood up, nodding, as if all this struck him as a reasonable, even enviable, proposal. Then he reached down and smacked his father hard on the back of the head, as if swatting a particularly vicious and slow-moving horsefly that had settled there. “Give him the motherfucking glove, Luther,” he said. “And then get the fuck out of here. I can’t stand the sight or smell of either of you blackmailing, lying, murdering old motherfuckers. Give Mr. Flowers the glove before I take it off you and give it to the police myself.”

  “I can’t do that,” Luther said.

  “Why not? Because you’re going to take all that money he ain’t never going to give you, use it to make a movie you ain’t never going to make?”

  Archy might have counted on one hand the number of times in his life when he had left his father with nothing to say. He figured it was the slap on the head, or maybe there was something persuasive in the nakedness of his contempt for Luther’s project. Luther fell back to muttering, shaking his head. Reminding Archy of that wino on his crate the other day outside Neldam’s, clinging to his little sack of rolls.

  “Give him the glove,” Archy said, fighting—for his own sake, not for Luther’s—to keep any tone of compassion out of his voice. “And I will pay for your movie.”

  Steak through the bars of a shark cage. Luther looked up, wary and hungering. “How?”

  “Sell the store. Whatever I get from my half, I give it to you.”

  “Now, why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Archy said. “It can’t be because I give a fuck what happens to your worthless black ass.”

  “Boy,” Luther said, drawing himself up out of the chair, still with a good two inches on Archy though giving up at least twenty-five pounds, “I am grateful for the generous offer, but I am tired of your disrespect. I am going to issue a warning. You speak to me again in that fashion, you going to find yourself in possession of one genuine, old-school beatdown like you haven’t had in thirty years.”

  “Man,” Archy said in an unconscious echo of his own son’s words to him the other morning, “fuck you.”

  “Gentlemen,” Flowers said. It was too late.

  Archy’s historic decision, taken sometime around 1983, no longer to give a shit about his father, coincided almost precisely with the last time he had attempted to kick Luther’s ass. Like the five or six preceding it, that attempt also failed. Even big and strong and flooded with the manhood that he was then well on his way to attaining, and even with Luther geeked and anorexic, Archy’s bulk and raw anger were no use against his father’s deep-grained skill.

  But this was a sneak attack, and Archy exploited the advantage. He hurled himself onto Luther, toppling him over onto the little couch, which in turn tumbled over backward, and the two men fell on the floor. Before Luther could begin to recover, Archy scrambled across him, straddling him, and flipped him over so that Luther’s face was pressed against the low-pile gray carpet. He sat on his father’s ass and pinned his wrists together with one hand while, with the other, he grabbed hold of his hair. Digging in his fingers, he jerked his father’s head back. “Give it to him.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Archy dug deeper, jerked harder. “Give him the glove, Luther.”

  “I can’t. Get off me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I lost it.”

  “Lost it? You mean you never did find it? Valletta didn’t have it?”

  “She had it. But in the last move we did, I don’t know, it got lost. I can’t find it. I swear. Get the fuck off me.”

  “What?”

  “I had it,” Luther said, writing his own epitaph without trying. “But I lost it.”

  “I would really like to believe that,” Flowers said. “I’m going to need some kind of guarantee. What happens when it turns up again?”

  “How about a sworn statement,” Archy said. “An affidavit he writes in his own words that he’s been blackmailing you for years, that he made up the whole story about the glove and the murder, how you didn’t have nothing to do with it.” He gave his father’s head another jerk, for emphasis, really. “You do that, confess that you’ve been blackmailing, Luther? I’ll give you whatever I manage to get from selling the store. Then you get to keep on living this admirable life of yours.”

  “That would be acceptable to me,” Flowers said. “But huh, we’re going to need a lawyer for an affidavit like that. I can’t imagine what kind of lawyer. I know mine wouldn’t want to even hear about this. ”

  Archy said he thought that Mike Oberstein might be prevailed upon, but first of all, what did Luther have to say about it?

  “Had three things on my wish list,” said Luther, “coming out of the program last year. And one of them was not ‘Please let my son slap me upside my head, pull my hair, and sit on top of me, motherfucker must weigh two hundred and forty, two-forty-five.’ ”

  “Yeah,” Archy said. “Oh. Sorry about that.” He unstraddled his father, lurched to his feet. Luther rolled over onto his back and lay there, staring at the cottage-cheese ceiling, at the box that held Terrell Padgett. His eyes brimmed over, but he blinked the tears away, and they were gone.

  Archy reached down and held out a hand to Luther. Luther took it. He let Archy pull his weightless wiry armature off the floor. When Archy tried to get his fingers loose, Luther held on to them. His grip was the inveterate iron thing that had punished cinder blocks, pine planks, Chuck Norris. Archy gave up and let his father shake his hand.

  “That was number two on the list,” Luther said.

  The mom was a kid, two months shy of twenty-one, her baby’s father out of the picture. She worked the line at Chez Panisse and from time to time sold cupcakes out of a taco truck. When Aviva had first met her, she was a strawberry-blond third-grader named Rainbow, the daughter of the facilitator of a women’s-business network Aviva had belonged to at the time. A wordless slip of a girl, moving sideways at the edges of rooms. Now she was dyed to a shade of blackberry brunette, had dropped the second syllable of her name, tattooed maybe 60 percent of her body with a gaudy loteria of half-allegorical objects (a bee, an umbrella, an egg in an eggcup), and, for today at least, taken center stage in her world. In the world; Aviva still felt that way after all these years, after having caught a thousand babies and been afforded every opportunity by routine, patient-borne neurosis, or the health care industry to grow disenchanted, jaded, or bored with the work. A person tended to see herself as a streetlamp on a misty night, at the center of a sphere of radiance, but that was a trick of the light, an illusion of centrality in a general fog. A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.

  “I feel like I’m going to shit,” Rain said. She had gotten all the way to eight centimeters within two hours of her first contraction, but the journey to the hospital seemed to have slowed her down. “What if I shit in the bed?”

  “I dare you,” said Aviva.

  Click of the door latch, inrush of hospital hum. Aviva had her back to the door of the pretty new LDR that Rain had lucked into, blond wood and chrome trim, a suggestion of slim Danish moms giving birth to strapping young socialists. Audrey, Rain’s mother, leaped up from the armchair to drag the curtain around the bed with a rattle of BBs.

  “Ms. Jaffe?” It was one of the nurses, a Filipina named Sally, a good nurse, with the same well-trained way Gwen had of being sugar-sweet and kick-ass at the same time. “Your darling husband is here.”

  It was Aviva’s turn to leap to her feet. She could not recall Nat eve
r having shown up at the hospital, unbidden. Maybe to bring her a more comfortable pair of shoes, something to eat. For him to turn up out of the blue had to mean bad news, disaster. As she followed Sally down to the nurses’ station to meet him, she fished her phone from her back pocket, looking for the voice mail she must have missed. No calls from Nat or Julie. No calls from anyone at all.

  He was drawing an invisible mandala across the glossy tile with his high-top Chuck Taylors, head down, hands in the back pockets of the jeans she liked best on him, humming the soundtrack to his impatience. When he saw her, the panic in his face gave way so suddenly to relief that she thought he would cry.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Gwen’s in labor.”

  “Is Archy there?”

  “No. She’s not home, Aviva. She’s here.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yeah. Her water broke, there was meconium?”

  “A lot?”

  “Not a lot, but some. The doc said we probably don’t need to worry yet, but they wanted her admitted and on the monitor. In case there’s some fetal distress.”

  “Who’s the attending?”

  “Your boy.”

  “Lazar?”

  “Quite the charmer.”

  “Shit! Were you with her when her water broke?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  A blankness drifted across his face like ink from a squid, alerting her that the next words to issue from his lips were going to maintain a fraught if not adversarial relation to the truth. “I lost my phone,” he said.

  “Lost it where?”

  He shrugged. “In the car.”

  She decided, whatever the lie, to let it go for now. “How is Gwen?” she said.

  Since leaving the house to meet Rain and Audrey at the hospital, Aviva had been aware, a ground underlying the figure of every calm suggestion she made to Rain, every forbearing interaction she had with the staff, that the whole of her emotional capacity—carefully concealed from everyone around like the blacked-out windows of some wartime aircraft factory—had been shifted over to the production of anger; she was furious with Gwen.