the van on the floor of the garage. Turned out to be Count Basie’s birthday: KCSM was playing the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross version of “Li’l Darlin,” the Count himself taking a rare spin at the keys of a B-3, holding on to the mournful churchliness that the instrument had carried over coming, right around that time, into jazz.
Mr. Jones got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco and settled in to observe the boy work. He found it satisfying to watch Archy’s meaty Jazzmaster fingers take up one by one the Leslie’s unlikely components, items could have been scrounged from a kitchen drawer, a toy box, and a U-boat, then oblige them, one by one, to cohabit inside the cabinet. His pipe, an angular modernist briar, a gift from Archie Shepp, seemed to draw particularly well today. Alongside the driveway, bees lazed among the honeysuckle bells, and a hummingbird sounded its mysterious ping. Fifty-Eight rummaged idly with its black bill in its dappled breast. The Leslie would be fixed, and they would play their gig tonight up in the Berkeley hills. Everything was manifestly all right. And yet something continued to rankle at Mr. Jones, like a sour finger of acid in the windpipe, a failure that loomed ahead of or lay behind both Archy and himself.
“What ‘other things’?” Mr. Jones said.
Fifty-Eight pinged like a hummingbird.
“Huh?” Archy had the treble assembly mounted in the uppermost of the cabinet’s three stories, belted to the AC motor. He crouched, peering in, listening to the well-oiled silence as the disk with the two horns, the real horn and its dummy brother, whirled on the bearing tube. Blades of a propeller on a cartoon beanie. “What other things
“You distracted by.”
Archy switched off the power, and the treble rotor came to rest with an audible sigh. He swung around to face Mr. Jones, laborious and purposeful as a bus turning a tight corner. Rocked back on his haunches, contemplating. Breathing through his nose. Making up his mind whether or not he wanted to start in on it.
“Turns out I got a son,” he said. “Fourteen years old. Showed up at the store yesterday out of the motherfucking blue. Turns out he’s been living right here in Oakland since June.”
Enough time went by for Archy to fairly conclude that Mr. Jones might have nothing to say. Even though Mr. Jones had suspected, even hoped, that Titus might be the “distraction,” the word “son” had caught him off-guard, which in turn left him nonplussed on a deeper level, irritated that the word should still, after all these years, reverberate. At one time you could drop it like a tray of dishes on a tile floor, cut off every conversation taking place inside of Mr. Jones. Now it played only with a soft tremolo of regret, more or less like any other regret that might be audible to the heart of a man of sixty-six. Mr. Jones sat there, confounded by grief, turning Archy’s information this way and that, a paperweight, something small and heavy cut with a lot of facets. Wanting to say something to this fine and talented young man, something lasting and useful about sons, loss, and regrets. The longer the silence stretched between them, the more irritated Mr. Jones became. Archy swung back to the Leslie. Unplugged it, picked up the bass rotor, and slid it into place, tightened the mounting nuts.
“You know your wife how long?” Mr. Jones said.
“Ten years.”
“Uh-huh.”
The pipe was dead, and Mr. Jones passed it to the bird. The bird nipped onto the pipe stem with a click of its beak, then flew off the perch and into the morning. Knock-knocking it against the sidewalk. Probably dropping its mess while it was out there, bird better housebroken than a child of five. A few seconds later, the bird came flustering back to light on Mr. Jones’s shoulder. Passed back the pipe with its freshly emptied bowl. Fifty-Eight had come equipped with that trick by some owner before Mr. Jones, before Marcus Stubbs, who had lost the bird to Mr. Jones in a poker game and who did not smoke a pipe and who furthermore could not have trained a shark to favor steak. Mr. Jones took the pipe, and the bird hopped back up onto the makeshift perch.
“I didn’t tell my wife yet, by the way,” Archy said. “Case you were wondering.”
“You didn’t know you had a son before now?”
“I knew, but I mean, we never had, like, contact. Boy was off in Texas somewheres, uh, Tyler, I think it is.”
“I know it.” Gigging at some corrugated-shack crossroads bar and grill, the night dense and humid and haunted by a smell of roses. Idris Muhammad on the drums back when he was a kid named Leo Morris. Going on half a century ago.
“Boy had his granny, the mom’s mom, living there,” Archy said. “The old lady sent me a picture one time.”
“Uh-huh.”
Mr. Jones poked another hank of his favorite perique into the bowl of his pipe, tamped it down with a finger.
“Nobody ever asked me to be a daddy to the boy,” Archy said. “And I didn’t… you know. Volunteer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yesterday, boy shows up in my store, and I still don’t really understand why, but. He’s with Julie, you know.”
“Julie?
“Julie Jaffe.”
“I didn’t know that boy had any friends.”
“Julie got a full-on crush on the motherfucker.”
“Oh,” Mr. Jones said. “So he’s like that?”
“I do believe that he is,” Archy said.
Nothing in that to disturb Mr. Jones. When it came to lifestyles and behaviors, Mr. Jones played it strictly live and let live. Gays, Wiccans, people who wanted to punch a metal grommet in their earflaps. But somehow it made Mr. Jones sad, without surprising him, to learn that Julie Jaffe had come out a homosexual. That felt to him like something too complicated, too heavy, for a boy so young to lay on himself. He did not disapprove, but he could not see any reward in it. “Boy that age,” he said, shaking his head. “Smart, too.”
The bird beeped like Mr. Jones’s microwave, four times. Popcorn, popped. Then, following its own inscrutable logic, it began to articulate Groove Holmes’s version of the chorus to “American Pie.” A ghostly rotor whirring in its throat.
“Said they met up at some film class,” Archy said, setting the woofer drum into place in the lower story of the Leslie. “Over at the Southside Senior Center.”
“Is that right?” Mr. Jones said, staring at the parrot as if to warn it to hold his tongue about that evening in June.
“It’s a Quentin Tarantino class. I don’t know, I guess they’re studying
“Only I did sign up for it,” said Mr. Jones. “Sounds like you got to be talking about my boy Titus. No shit, that’s your son?”
Archy raised up slow and careful. Came around on Mr. Jones a little at a time, like he expected to find himself looking down the barrel of a gun. “You know him?”
Whenever Mr. Jones, again in the characteristic style of useless old men, wished to contemplate the brokenness of the world, or at least that part of the world bounded by the Grove-Shafter Freeway and Telegraph Avenue on Forty-second Street, he had only to look across and up two doors to the home of his neighbor Mrs. Wiggins. The woman already seemed old when he and Francesca first moved in with Francesca’s mother back in 1967. But Mrs. Wiggins was strong then, furious and churchgoing, pleased to be known for and to advertise her own iron rule over the tribes of loose children who flowed like migrants through her door—the late Jamila Joyner among them—taking what she could pay them in love and beatdowns, in clean clothes, food on the table. Years, decades, Mrs. Wiggins went on and on, like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting in the Solomon Islands or wherever, nobody ever showing up to reinforce her, tell the poor woman to surrender. But time, crime, and misery in all its many morphologies had at last ground old Mrs. Wiggins down. Though she lived still, she was a gibbering ghost of herself. You had to pity any child who found himself consigned by the high court of bad luck to her care. When Mr. Jones was growing up in Oklahoma City, he had been taken to a carnival whose sideshow featured a man purported to be John C. Fremont and a hundred and twenty-odd years old. Bone hands, a mat of hair, and a pair of filmy eyes peering out from a heap of blankets, shivering. All around the staring thing, in the shadowed tent, stirred
