Telegraph Avenue

would come when he, too, would look back on a moment’s thoughtless heroism, almost twenty years before, as the only useful thing he had ever done.

“First thing, I came to apologize,” he told Archy. “I’m sorry. I fucked up.”

“I see.”

Archy was going to delay acceptance for a while, Nat knew. Apologies were the flip side of Nat’s huffing and puffing, and they flowed so freely from his lips that the people in his life had learned to hold out against them as stoutly as against the tantrums that necessitated them. Hunker down in the house of bricks, wait and see if Nat planned to come all the way down the chimney. He always did.

“That’s why the donuts,” he said.

“They are appreciated,” Archy said. He opened the box, surveyed its contents like he was taking a first look at a crate of fresh inventory, there being, of course, as Archy often explained to Nat, a profound spiritual analogy, hole and all, between donuts and vinyl records.

“So, I’m sorry. I was a total ass. That’s first. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I will apologize to everyone personally. Mr. Jones, Moby. All of them.”

In the last paragraph of that clipping from the Times-Dispatch, it had been reported, with a certain editorial bemusement, that after foiling the robbery, storekeeper Jaffe had been heard to apologize to the would-be robber for having beaned him with a lead ingot.

“Okay, okay,” Archy said, wigwagging his hand impatiently. “I got it. Apology accepted. What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is,” Nat said, and as he prepared to adumbrate the second item on his agenda, it did him the great favor of occurring to him: a sentence that his father, rest his soul, had never quite managed to articulate aloud, at least in Nat’s hearing. “I am not going to lose this motherfucking store.”

“Well, all right.”

“Because I don’t know about you, but I feel like, Archy, if I don’t have this place? I’m not sure I really have a place.”

“I hear you.”

“You think it’s melodramatic.”

“You? No way.”

“Because I’m totally serious,” Nat said. “Look at me. What else am I fit for, you know? The ice melts, where do you put the penguin?”

“A valid question.”

“Where else am I going to be.”

“In the spiritual sense, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Besides,” Archy said, his eyebrows saying, Brace yourself, you are about to get fucked with, “like, in your house. With your family.”

“Archy, I love my wife, and I love my son. You know that.”

“I do.”

“You’ll attest to that.”

“I will.”

“But this store is my world. These are my records. You know?”

“I do know, Nat.” For all of Archy’s teasing, the tongue-in-cheek approbations, Nat had felt his words landing, sticking, here and there, like snow on ready ground. When you chose to pledge your share of labor and your worldly assets to partnership with a man who liked to get up on his high horse, make speeches, let it rip, it was probably because you knew that somebody had to do that from time to time, and it wasn’t going to be you. “This store is our world.”

“You get that.”

“I do.”

“So that’s why I’m not just going to stand around being useless,” Nat said, having worked it all out: the feeling of being caught under the wheels of the Dogpile juggernaut that Mirchandani’s news had first engendered. The bitterness of his talk with Julie. The memories of his father’s bookmark life. “I’m going to fight them.”

“Gibson Goode?”

“Gibson Goode. Chan Flowers. All those motherfuckers.”

Archy smiled, neither mocking nor quite pleased. The smile you gave something, good or bad, when it showed up right on time.

“You’ll help me, right, Arch? If I promise I won’t do anything stupid, lose my temper? If I keep it constructive and positive? You’re going to help me fight?”

Before he could get an answer out of Archy—not that, when you came right down to it, he really needed one—a pattern of percussion intruded from outside the store, getting itself all tangled up with the thing Jack DeJohnette was laying down on the store’s turntable; the door banged open; and the boys came in, Julie and that kid, Julie giving off strong waves of something heavily plated with Moog and in a tricky time signature, sounded like Return to Forever. The boy never went anywhere without that fucking eight-track now, bopping all over town with his woeful Isro and his bell-bottom jeans, some kind of little Jewish soul elf. All of Nat’s regret and retrospective longing to connect to his son seemed to turn at once to irritation. He reached for the eight-track’s dial, and the volume dropped to zero.

“Who’s this?” Nat turned to the other boy. “Who are you?”

“Okay,” Julie said. “So. Dad.”

From the time he went verbal—two, three years old—Julie had made it a point to appear before the bench with his arguments scrubbed and tidied. Business plan all formatted and punctuated. Scheming, deep scheming, but letting you see that he was scheming, that your consciousness of his machination was a part, maybe the key element, of his scheme.

“This is Titus Joyner. He and I met in my film class, you know, ‘Sampling as Revenge,’ the Tarantino thing, which by the way is awesome, this week we get to watch Clockwork Orange, which is possibly not as great as 2001 or The Shining but is maybe number three, as I think you will agree.”

Nat signaled that he was willing at least to argue this—he was not personally interested in any top three that did not include Barry Lyndon—but something had come over Archy. He stared at Titus Joyner, unblinking, breathing through his mouth. A kind of exploratory alarm, Nat would have said, as if he’d just realized he had left his wallet in a taxicab in a city far away and was trying to remember how much money it contained.

“Yeah,” Julie said. “So, moving along, Titus, say hi, Titus.”

“Hi.”

“So, what can I tell you? Titus just moved to Oakland, not, what, not even two months ago, from Texas. He is fourteen years old, extremely intelligent, and well behaved. Really good at MTO. Has excellent habits of personal hygiene, as you can see.”

Indeed, the kid’s pleats, seams, and hemlines were all crisp and tidy. His nails were flawless seashells.

“He was living with his granny Shy in Texas, but Shy died, and now he is living at his old, crazy, like, senile auntie’s house, where there were already—what was it—fourteen?”

He turned to his friend, who was staring blindly up at Art Kane’s famous photograph of that great day in Harlem, looking like his ears were full of hornets that he was trying not to anger or disturb.

“Nine,” he said softly.

“Nine!” Julie cried, as if this were a number even greater and more outrageous than fourteen. “He’s living in unsafe, unhealthy, and unsanitary conditions, and don’t get all wiggy on me, okay, Dad, but I told him that, pending an intense family discussion between you and Mom, he might be able, we might consider, seeing as how he is such an awesome, nice, smart person with so many startling creative ideas and what I might be tempted to call a truly fresh cinematic vision—”

“Resist the temptation,” Nat said. “I beg you.”

“I was hoping he could stay with us. Unless maybe—”

Julie turned to Archy. Hitherto, he had been carried away on a gust of his own enthusiasm, but his nerve or