“Popcorn Hughes,” Luther said admiringly.
“I need to hide myself, Luther.”
“Where at?” Dread inflated a taut balloon in Luther’s rib cage. He could barely muster breath to get out the next syllables: “L.A.?”
For that was the obvious solution: Swing by Luther’s mother’s house and pick up the canvas suitcase and the three Berkeley Farms crates, packed and ready to go. Hit L.A. by morning, Chan could buy what he needed when they got there. Track down some shitbox safe house where Chan could hole up. Wave goodbye then. Engage in the theater of turning their separate ways, meeting their respective fates, until the next of his friend’s schemes went wrong, the next time Chan found himself confronting the truth that his faith in himself was misplaced, his intelligence fated to go unrewarded because it was no substitute for luck, no proof against the world’s massive, even hostile, indifference to the productions of a black man’s intellect. Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time-lapse photos of a promise as it broke. He was a king of finite space, bound in a nutshell. And Luther was sick of it. He rued all the time he had wasted since the call came from his agent, feeling guilty, feeling sorry for Chan.
“Or,” he said, trying to be helpful, “uh, lot of Panthers in Chicago, right?”
Chan didn’t say anything.
“Morocco, then. Or Spain.”
“Spain,” Chan said. Luther could hear the hard little smile creasing his face. “Good thinking. Go to Spain. Become a toronado.”
“Why not? All the revolutionary Negroes been skipping to Morocco, Spain. Paris. You were doing their business. They got to take care of you.”
“Who?”
“The Party.”
“Luther, if I had the kind of clout, get myself that far away from here? I wouldn’t have needed to impress anybody in the first place with the fool thing I just tried to do.”
Somewhere right around here, Luther remembered, if you went farther up the path behind the picnic tables, you would stumble across a pyramid of built-up stones left behind by some crazy old beard-faced poet back when Oakland was nothing but a slough and a stables and a cowboy hotel. In school they came here on field trips, checking out the poet’s little white farmhouse, a big lumpy statue of him riding on a Mongoloid-looking horse. A pyramid of stone and, farther back, a stone platform the man had built, intending it to be used for his funeral pyre. Out here in the hot sun, day after day, the man piling up rocks like lines in one of his boring poems. Dreaming, the whole time he was stacking those rocks, about how all those olden-time gangsters of Oakland, those whoring, robbing, land-grabbing Indian killers, opium addicts and loot seekers down there in the flatlands, how some fine night they were going to look up here at this green slope and marvel at the spectacle of a burning poet. Nothing ever came of that plan, far as Luther could recall. But then that was the general tendency of plans.
“If you’re a fool,” Luther said, “what’s that make me?”
This was a question that could never be answered, and Luther carried swiftly on to the next.
“Why’d I want to go and mess up my good thing driving your murder taxi around West Oakland?” he said. “Tell me that? So the Marxist gangsters can roll over the running-dog capitalist gangsters, take over their drugs and cash flow?”
“Leave, then,” Chan said. “You’re not in this. You go on and get.”
Before Luther could begin to feign that he was not entertaining this generous suggestion, there was a flicker of moonlight, like the bright quick of a fingernail, at the corner of his eye. Chan was pondering a handgun. Taken like the shotgun, no doubt, from the Party arsenal that it was Chan’s official duty to keep inventoried, secret, and in fighting shape. A .45, a handsome piece, probably brand-new. Luther’s heart misgave at the way Chan was balancing it on both palms, weighing it like a heavy book that held a heavy answer.
“What you going to do with that?” Luther said.
“Try again,” Chan said at last. “Find out what hospital they took Popcorn to.” He found a solid grip on the pistol. “Get it right the second time.”
“Maybe you ought to talk to somebody first. Maybe Huey be satisfied with what you already did to fuck Popcorn up for him.”
A fog began to blur the prospect of Oakland spread beneath them. Silence gathered around the friends until it felt like something profound. The coals of their cigarettes flared and crackled. The fog hissed like carbonation in a drink.
“You remember what your uncle Oogie used to do on your birthday, at Christmas?” Chan said finally. “All ‘Yeah, uh, listen, I was going to get you a air rifle.’” His imitation of Oogie’s mumbly drawl was flawless. “Expecting you to be as grateful as if he did give it to you. Now I’m supposed to say, ‘Uh, yeah, Huey, I was going to kill Popcorn Hughes for you, but, uh…’?”
“Why not?”
“‘Why not?’” Chan said, making it come out high and childish. “Easy for you to say. Tell me this. You get down there on that movie set, are you going to forget your lines? Tell the director, ‘Uh, yeah, I meant to memorize that shit, but, uh…’?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“No!”
“Then why do you want me to do it?”
“Come on, then,” Luther said. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Let’s, uh, let’s get out of here. You come with me. Down to L.A. Hide out down there. San Pedro. Long Beach.” Trying to summon or feign enthusiasm for his proposal. “Yeah, Ensenada.”
It was too dark for Chan to see what was not in Luther’s eyes and too dark for Luther to see him missing it.
Chan stood up and dropped the .45 into his hip pocket. It rattled against the extra shotgun rounds. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “had all kinds of beautiful intentions. Prove myself to the Supreme Servant of the People, take a major annoyance off his hands. Move in, move up, maybe in a year I’m running the Oakland chapter. Then I get my eye on the account books. See what kind of holes might be in them, waste and whatnot. Bring a little more structure, a little more discipline. Now, no. Nuh-uh. Now I just have to make it
His voice broke, and from the crack in it emerged the voice of the boy he recently was. Fiercely shy and bookish, absorbing without saturation, on behalf of his sisters and his baby brother, the endless seep of the elder Flowers’s venom. At the memory of that vanished boy, Luther regretted, without entirely renouncing, his earlier disloyal thoughts. He put his arm around the professorial shoulders of his friend. “It’s already too wrong, Chan,” he said. “No way you can make it right.”
“That is probably true.”
“You got to leave. Come on. Come to L.A., hole up. Ride it out.”
“I appreciate the gesture, Luther,” Chan said. “I already troubled you sufficiently.”
“Then go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Anywheres that a bus could take you.”
“Maybe I will,” Chan said, to end the conversation.
When the peppermint brandy was drunk, they got up and left behind them the spot where a forgotten dreamer of the California dream had planned to have his glory notarized by fire. Turned and hiked, sliding, back down to the car. After a silent drive to the bottom of the city, the blue dome of the Greyhound station loomed before them like a promise of adventure. There was an OPD cruiser parked at the curb when they pulled up, but before they could consider bailing on the bus station plan, a cop came strolling out of the station, got back into the car, and drove away.
Luther had three hundred dollars in his wallet, all that was left of his up-front money. He handed it over to Chan, “ ’Kay, then,” he said.
They stood facing each other at the back of the Toronado. Its taillights were slits as narrow as the eyes in
