effective all out of proportion to their cost. My father used to say, ‘Carry ’em like a roll of bills in your hip pocket, pass ’em out freely.’ Remember that.”
“Cool, okay.”
“Used to say, ‘They are good for business, and they make the world a better place.’”
Clearly, his dad was cycling high today, getting that Groucho Marx quality to his delivery. For years he had been on and off various medications whose names sounded like the code names of sorceresses or ninja assassins. Disastrous from the first dose or disappointing in the long run, each wore out its welcome in his father’s bloodstream without ever managing to lay an insulating glove on the glowing wire inside him. His moods had little in the way of pattern or regular rotation apart from a possible intensification in Septembers and Februarys, but if Julie had over time learned to live unshaken by his father’s unpredictable temblors of mania, he had grown inured as well to their completely predictable aftermaths, however heartfelt, of apology and remorse.
“Say sorry,” Nat said. “Then open the store back up like I was, you know, on a little mental lunch break. False alarm. Everybody go about your business.”
“Except Gibson Goode, right?”
“Whatever,” his father said. “Man has a right to sell what he wants, where he wants. Bring him on. Meanwhile, you. Cheer up. You got two more weeks of summer to get through.”
With a wan crackle, the Field of Silence fluttered back to life between them.
His father closed the door. Julie listened for the creak of his passage down the twisting stair.
The narrow, mirrored door of the old art deco chifforobe swung open, betraying the folded articulate span, half dressed in pressed blue jeans, of Titus Joyner.
“Yo yo yo,” Titus said. Bit by careful bit, he took himself out of the chifforobe and reassembled himself on the floor of Julie’s bedroom, a hit man snapping together the pieces of his rifle. He looked tired. He smelled like the locker room at the Y. “Five more minutes,” he said.
He unrolled himself along the floor of Julie’s room, on the coiled braids of a rag rug, and stretched out. He closed his eyes; his breathing turned solemn and slowed the rise and fall of his chest. He was a prodigy of furtive and impromptu sleep. The nightly bed that fate had furnished him was a zone of danger and dark insomnia. If you closed your eyes in that unsafe house, they would rifle your nightmares and violate your dreams.
“Titus,” Julie said. “Yo, T.”
Nothing; gone. Julie pulled the quilt from his bed and laid it over Titus. It was an antique of the ’80s, Michael Jackson in a tacky spacesuit with a motley crew of robots and aliens. Julie stared at the boy on his floor, a mystery boy fallen from the sky like the Wold Newton meteorite, apparently inert and yet invisibly seething with the mutagenic information of distant galaxies and exploding stars.
Julie was in love.
The title of the course, offered through the summer evening enrichment program of the city of Berkeley’s Southside Senior Center, was “Sampling as Revenge: Source and Allusion in
That first Monday in June, a week after his graduation from Willard, Julie had taken his seat in the front row of five chairs at the exact center of the room, midway between the video projector and Peter Van Eder, whom Julie had always imagined, from his irritated tone in the
Julie took a glue stick and a bright orange notebook, quadrille-ruled, out of a Pan Am flight bag. Neatly, he folded and glued to the inside front cover the syllabus of films that Peter Van Eder proposed to screen and discuss:
Julie studied the syllabus as Van Eder waited for the last two names on his roster, one of them, Julie was interested to learn, being Randall Jones. Mr. Jones had both given and attended classes at the Southside Senior Center, and it was through him, a few years ago, that Julie had learned of the puppet-making class. Mr. Jones, whose taste in film ran strongly to violent western and crime, was a regular attendee of Peter Van Eder’s film series at the Southside.
Julie found himself dizzied by his ignorance of Van Eder’s choices, only two of which, the Sergio Leone and
Somebody said, “Look at the
Cochise Jones, wearing a leisure suit with a faded houndstooth check, stepped into the multipurpose room with Fifty-Eight manning the poop deck of his left shoulder, trailing a kid, perhaps a grandson, about Julie’s age, light-skinned, light-eyed, broad at the shoulder, and slender at the hips. Though as far as Julie knew, Mr. Jones didn’t have any family apart from the bird. When he noticed Julie, he frowned, looking thoughtful, hesitating, as if trying to make up his mind about bringing over the kid to meet Julie.
“He a friend of Fifty-Eight,” Mr. Jones explained straight-faced, apparently deciding that no harm could come of the introduction. “Also a fan of Mr. Tarantino.” Only he pronounced the name as if it rhymed with “Tipitina.”
“Hey,” said Julie, twisting a finger in the tattered selvage of his denim cutoffs until the blood ceased to circulate in his fingertip. His index finger in its noose of cotton thread swelled and pulsed and throbbed and in general served as symbol or synecdoche for its owner and his fourteen-year-old heart, for that all-encompassing, all-expanding disturbance in his skinny little chest that was the love of Tarantino, the world, or all mankind. “I like him, too.”
Titus Joyner nodded, mildly amused (if that) by the spectacle of Julie in his cutoffs and sleeveless T, his portable eight-track on the floor by his feet in their clear white jellies, with his bright blue flight bag like one of the moon stewardesses in
“What’s up?” he said.
Julie took a card, newly printed, from his wallet, and passed it to the kid, one that read:
