Telegraph Avenue

pushing out Walter’s lower lip, Archy knew it was a stupid question. “Oh, okay,” he said. “It’s like that.”

“Quit pro crow,” Walter said. “As they say. One hand scratching the other.”

“Chan’s little Walter,” Archy said. “I begin to understand.”

A pudgy boy, soft-faced, asthmatic, given to fevers, often hospitalized, supposedly a dead ringer for Chan Flowers’s only brother who had died, Walter was always Chan’s favorite, could always worm his way out of whatever trouble the other nephews got into. All due respect to cynicism itself and to Mr. Mirchandani its prophet, it was hard for Archy to believe that Flowers would sell out Brokeland for a simple payoff. The councilman didn’t give off the smell of that particular kind of corruption. But to reach out a hand to his nephew, the boy not a boy anymore, scuffling around for the past ten years, had only one eye. Maybe that was something Archy could begin to understand.

“‘Community relations,’” Archy said. “Mr. Gibson Goode.”

“Working for G Bad.”

“G Bad know you have a congenital condition in which you were sadly born full of shit?”

“Paid vacation. Corporate retreats in Hawaii. Health benefits.”

Walter trying to sound like it was all due and proper, Archy knowing him too well to miss the almost desperate wonder lighting up his face. Something like that coming along, a hook on a helicopter, snatching him out of the churn and froth and icy water. A paycheck, benefits. Archy imagined coming home with such things in his backpack, how it would be if he could meet Gwen’s reproachful look with news like that, the 50 percent gain in domestic peace that would result if he could move from being shiftless and cheating to merely the latter. A stack of quarters to feed the meter, move the needle out of the red, way over to the right.

“Yeah, that sounds real nice, Walter,” Archy said. “And I wish you the best. Now get the fuck out of here.”

“Turtle—”

“Are you serious? This is my house, you come in here, working for that corporate expansionist retail bullshit —”

“All right, chill, Turtle, damn. I get it. I know how much love you got for this old ex-barbershop, have so many spiderwebs, dust in here, all Roger Corman and shit.” Walter took in the faded sleeves tacked in Plexiglas frames, the old NyQuil-colored clamshell iBook they used for inventory, the bins that Archy and Nat had built themselves, mounting them on rollers so they could be pushed aside to make room for the famous Brokeland rent parties they rarely put on anymore. The arcologies of spiders. “But I tell you what. Dogpile is a one-hundred-percent black- owned enterprise. A hundred percent.”

As if summoned like a genie by this allusion, Nat walked into the store. He was carrying a box of donuts from the Federation next door, and he wore a soul patch of powdered sugar. He took in the spectacle of Walter’s tracksuit and shoes, then seemed to recognize Archy’s old friend with a vague nod.

“Oh, yeah, uh, Nat, this here, you remember Walter Bankwell? Old running buddy of mine? Walter, this is my partner, Nat Jaffe. Walter was, he’s in town on business, and, uh—”

“How you doing?” Nat said. He reached out to shake hands, but Walter raised his arms like a pair of crazy aerials at weird angles to his body. He flattened his hands into a pair of shovel blades and crouched low, sweeping the floor behind him in an arc with the toe of one foot. Some kind of Crane-style move, Archy thought.

Walter straightened up. “Later,” he told Archy without another glance at Nat. His shoes walked out of the store, followed shortly thereafter by Walter, gangster-leaning now a little to the left.

“We used to call him Kung Fu,” Archy explained.

“Just stopping by?”

“That’s all.”

“Old times’ sake.”

“We for sure used to get into some crazy shit, me and him. Right about when I was Julie’s age.”

“You still aren’t Julie’s age,” Nat said. “Julius Jaffe was born older than you are now.”

“I don’t know about that, boss,” Archy said.

Standing across the avenue, right in front of the funeral home, was Speak of the Devil, stepping his skateboard up into his hand, fidgeting alongside a solemn-faced youngster on a bicycle, nobody Archy knew. Casing the joint—Archy felt it deep in the mischief center of his brain—for some kind of metaphysical stickup.

Nat turned to see what Archy was seeing. “You know that other kid?” he asked.

He looked perturbed; recently, Archy gathered, Julie had begun to wobble on his axle. Until now it had been hard for Archy to imagine the boy getting into any kind of trouble that could not be ameliorated by rolling a handful of twenty-sided dice.

“Huh-uh,” he said. “From here, he looks like my little cousin Trevor, but no. That ain’t Trevor.”

“From here, you know who he looks like?”

“What are they doing, just standing there?”

“Maybe they’re planning to hold us up.”

“Huh,” Archy said, feeling, at this echo of his own offhand first reaction, a vague anxiety at the sight of Salt and Pepper over there, waiting to get spilled. “That why you came back?”

“No, Archy,” Nat said. “That’s not why I came back.”

Useless, by James Joyce. That was Nat’s father’s joke, passing sentence on himself when he spaced on the dry cleaning, when the phone bill went past due and service got cut, when he could not start a fire or turn over an engine, when he ran another candy store or newsstand into the ground. A man with a talent for nothing but tipping weary waitresses, slipping lollipops to babies when their mothers’ backs were turned. Saddled with the especial uselessness of the third-generation socialist, one of the lonely grandsons of Eugene V. Debs, stood up by Utopia, stranded with a payroll to make. Fatherhood among the Jaffes afforded a history of uselessness, with Nat only the latest chapter: luftmenschen, ineptitudes, and bankrupts going all the way back to Minsk Guberniya. Standing there like an ass in the doorway to Julie’s room—fucking useless!—serving up the traditional blend of banter and bluster, an old family recipe. Seeing misadventure, doubt, confusion in his son’s eyes and having not a clue what to do about it. Knowing that as the boy got older, every such moment might turn out to be the last of its kind. Something to be seized upon and savored, not allowed to slip away in hints and smart remarks.

Carpe diem. Was there ever a more useless piece of advice?

Nat remembered how, when he went back for his father’s funeral, a few weeks after he and Aviva started sleeping together, he found the old man’s copy of Ulysses in a box of ten-inch records, mainly classical, mostly Shostakovich. That chunky softcover from the late fifties or early sixties, fat “U,” slender “L,” swaybacked, edges sueded, pages yellow as the filter of a smoked cigarette. Tucked into his father’s favorite passage—the hungry cat giving its morning oration—Nat had found a clipping from the Times- Dispatch. NEWSSTAND OWNER FOILS ROBBERY. A Sunday morning in 1968 in Shockoe Bottom. Suspect, a Negro male in his early twenties, asked for a copy of Bird Fancier on a shelf behind the counter, then rifled the cash register when the owner’s back was turned. Pistol-whipped a customer who tried to intervene. Store owner Julius Jaffe, forty, then struck the assailant with a (Times- Dispatch) newspaper weight. Alertly flagged a passing police car. Almost certainly averted further violence, the suspect having served time at Powhatan for attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon. Julius the First was not the type to save clippings, never one to stand back and admire himself—the fifteen-year-old story came as news to Nat, who could only conclude that, though his father never spoke of it, the incident had meant a great deal to him. A high point in a life lived at sea level, prone to flooding.

At the time, when he was in the midst of mourning his father, the discovery of the clipping had made Nat smile. Three weeks earlier, walking home from the Telegraph Repertory where he worked as an usher, Nat had interrupted a mugger in the act of taking a wallet, a watch, and a silver Tibetan barrette off a young woman whom Nat recognized as a regular patron of the theater, particularly fond, it seemed, of the work of Elliott Gould, to whom Nat had always fancied he bore a resemblance. Nat acted without reflection, plan, or reservation and was rewarded for his courage with a blow to the stomach and a night in the arms of the young woman, whose name was Aviva Roth. As he read the old clipping—teary at the thought that the incident had meant so much to Julius that he kept a record of it between the favorite pages of his favorite book—it did not occur to Nat, not for an instant, that the day