seven out of the past ten years. Then Chandler Bankwell Flowers III looked, for real, dumbfounded.
“Councilman Abreu,” he said. “And very much at large.”
“This is terrific,” Abreu said with that untouchable chipperness, so like tedium, which must serve him well in his line of work. “I was just about to open it up to questions from these good people here. And you are so much more informed about this project than I am. I’m sure you all know, do you all know? what a big supporter of Dogpile and Mr. Goode the councilman has recently become after a certain period of sharing the reservations that I know many of us in this room also feel. So, Mr. Flowers, I don’t know, maybe you’d like to tell us some of the things you learned, or the decisions you came to, that helped you change your mind about this project.”
“I’d love to,” Flowers said. “Nothing would make me happier. Unfortunately, today I do not have the time. I’m just on my way from one appointment to another. Not even time to stop and browse the new-arrivals bin. Leave a little more of my hard-earned pay in that cash register over there.”
This got a bigger laugh than any Abreu had managed to scrape together from this crowd, admittedly, a tough Berkeley/Oakland crowd, its sense of humor reduced, like the sperm count of a man who wore his underwear too tight, by the heat of two dozen outraged brains. It occurred to Nat that Chan the Man appeared to be in fine form and might take it into his head to make a speech. Might even have come today prepared to make one. An address that would reach out to the core of
“Actually, I was just looking for you, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “If you’ve got a minute?”
It was an artless and genial question, and when the meeting resumed with a question from Dr. Milne about a peculiarity of Oakland zoning ordinances, no one paid it any mind apart from Nat, who happened to be looking at Archy when Archy, wary, unwilling, replied, “Yeah, you bet.”
In the cool penumbra of Chan Flowers’s office, Archy dropped into a wingback chair. It was big and soft as a grandmother, trellised cream chintz overwhelmed with pink roses. A chair for swooning in, for surrendering one’s dignity to, safe within the air-conditioned preserve of sympathy where, installed behind his desk, Chan Flowers received death’s custom with magisterial detachment, a gamekeeper crouched and watchful in a blind. Sweat cooled in cobwebs on Archy’s arms and forehead.
“Thanks for taking a minute, son,” Flowers said. “Didn’t seem to me you were necessarily involved in that mess over there.”
“Not necessarily,” Archy allowed. He fought the armchair, resisting its invitation to conform his frame to its armature of grief. Grief was itself a kind of chair, wide and forgiving, that might enfold you softly in its wings and then devour you, keep you like a pocketful of loose change. He found himself slouching in it, off-kilter, legs outflung, bare knees akimbo, covering his mouth with one hand like he was trying to bite back a smart remark.
“I thought maybe if it was convenient,” Flowers said, “you and I might have some details to go over for the funeral and all. One or two points that have come up in the fine print, so to speak.”
Archy nodded, already feeling some undercurrent in the conversation, this audience with the councilman, that he didn’t like. Bankwell and the other nephew, Feyd, stood guard at either side of the office door like a couple of foo dogs, too close to looming for Archy’s taste. They were the undertaker’s muscle, no doubt or question about that. At a funeral, if things turned unruly, a Flowers nephew might have to step in, keep the peace. If Flowers was burying a murder victim, somebody dropped by the logic of retaliation, if there was some history of blood and bad feeling abroad, a nephew might have to go strapped among the mourners. Bankwell and Feyd, in their copious suits, wore faces you could interpret as reflecting the tranquility of iron harbored at the hip. Archy remembered Bankwell obese and twelve, head too small for the rest of him, a neighborhood scandal after it was discovered that Bank had been getting his addled granny to pay him five dollars per book to solve her Dell Word Searches for her. Helping her to maintain her dignity, he claimed, so she could leave the books around her house with letters neatly circled, words crossed out. Archy wondered why Flowers felt that muscle was a necessary or desirable element for their rendezvous. He craned around to extend the nephews, by means of a bored slow stare, an invitation to go fuck themselves, saluting Feyd by hoisting his chin high. Feyd raised his own with an amiable coldness. He was reputed to be a tight and encyclopedic dancer, up on them all, from the Southside to turfing. Probably knew how to fight, too, did some capoeira, boy had that lean, springy
Archy returned to Chan, ready with a reply. “Do I have a choice?” he said.
“Of course,” Flowers said mildly, so mildly that Archy at once regretted his words and wished to retract them. Paranoid, imagining shit, guns and undercurrents. Come at the man sounding flip and disrespectful.
“If this is a bad time,” Flowers said, “I’m happy to—”
“Nah, no,” Archy said, “just kidding. Let’s do it.”
“Fine.”
“You were saying about Mr. Jones.”
“I was. Now, I’m sure Brother Singletary already told you, but Mr. Jones took care of everything, from the financial point of view and also in the matter of choices and selections.”
“Everybody knew that.” Singletary turning out to be Mr. Jones’s executor, fingers in every pie not already fingered up by Chandler Flowers. “I mean, shit, for a while he was carrying around a picture of his coffin folded up into his wallet, used to take it out and smile at it like he was looking at a centerfold or, like, a picture of Tahiti.”
“Mr. Jones, rest in peace, the man had his certain type of peculiarity, no doubt.”
“Asking to be buried in the Aztec number,” Archy said. “I heard.”
“Thing is hell of ugly,” Feyd said.
“The Aztec number was made by Ron Postal of Beverly Hills,” Archy said, grateful for the opportunity, as an alternative to adolescent slouching and mouthing off, to turn professorial and school the roostery motherfucker. “Acknowledged master of the American leisure suit. It’s truly one of a kind. Shit ought to be in the Smithsonian.”
“People can be very particular about burial attire,” Flowers said with all his perfected mildness. “No, the odd thing, what I’m talking about, maybe odd’s not the proper term. I was going through his instructions, you know, he has it all typed up single-spaced, six pages.” He opened a folder on his desk, forest green with hooks of white metal where you hung it from rails in the file drawer. With the tip of his middle finger, hardly larger than a boy’s, he began to tick off items on the first sheet of paper the folder contained. “He wanted the Cadillac hearse.”
“Naturally,” Archy said.
“Naturally. And we’re going to make that happen for him. He wanted it open casket—”
“How’s he look?”
“Now? Now he looks peaceful and dignified.”
“No sign of, uh, damage?”
“This is our art, Mr. Stallings,” Flowers said. “Our profession. Please. Man wanted the Chinese marching band, the Green Street Mortuary Band, from over in the city.” He looked up from the folder. “How’s that coming?”
“Turns out they’re already booked,” Archy said. “Morning and afternoon.”
“That is going to be a problem, then,” Flowers said.
“Please,” Archy said. He had been trading messages with Gwen’s receptionist, Kai, to see about booking her outfit, Bomp and Circumstance, to play the funeral parade. Mr. Jones had checked them out one time at the Temescal street fair. Bunch of straight-faced, brass-brandishing cute little tattooed lesbianettes playing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” wasn’t ever going to have too much trouble putting a smile on Mr. Jones’s face. “This is my art and my profession.”
“Fair enough.”
“So I’m still waiting for the points that have come up,” Archy said. “In the fine print.”
“Well,” Flowers said, “the gentleman, rest his soul, he had an aversion, you might say, to religion. I’m sure you know.”
“He was deep, though.”
