Telegraph Avenue

“Yes, he was. But he made it clear,” tapping the third typed sheet of paper in the green folder, “he didn’t want a preacher or a minister, didn’t want no church. Didn’t even want to hold the service here at the funeral home. What with the stained glass and, I guess, the pews in the chapels and so on. We got Bibles, we got hymnals. A general atmosphere of, call it, reverent solemnity. I mean, I try to keep the religious element unobtrusive, respectful. Technically, this is a secular operation. But, well, they are called funeral chapels, and Mr. Jones—”

“He was a true-blue atheist,” Archy said. “I remember my pops saying how Mr. Jones, at one time he was even a full-on Communist.”

“How is Luther?” Flowers said, tired, uninterested, milder than ever. Asking it pro forma. But one pop-eye peeper flicked left, checking in on Bankwell, telling the man, You pay attention, now.

“I wouldn’t know,” Archy said.

“You haven’t seen him?”

“Not for like two years. What he do this time?”

“Didn’t do anything,” Chan Flowers said. “I never said he did.”

“But you’re looking for him,” Archy said. “I get the distinct impression.”

“I might be.”

“If you’re looking for him,” Archy said, “he must of done something.”

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, at the bottom of Flowers’s face. Archy did not know the nature of the ancient beef that Chan Flowers had with Luther Stallings. The history of the matter was banned and obscure. His aunties had made inquiries, put out feelers. For years they continued to probe the gossip pits, turn over the ashes with their sticks. But even those legendary connoisseurs of scandal never found anything to definitively explain the break, apart from whispers of a connection to some mythic murder of the Panther years. As boys, Archy knew, Chan and Luther had been famously thick, chronic co-conspirators. Then, when Archy was maybe four or five years old, around the time Luther started acting in movies, the friendship was abandoned like a house, sealed by law, condemned.

“Whatever he did, I assume it is all his fault,” Archy said. “Let me just put that out there to start.”

“You may well be right,” Flowers said. “Luther may have done something, and whatever he did is probably, I’m sorry to say, his fault. But that’s not here nor there. I just need to see the man. I just need to talk to him.”

There was a photograph that Archy remembered, hung from the wall of his father’s various apartments. It was a glossy black and white, taken by a Tribune photographer, at an Oakland Tech dance, Luther Stallings and Chan Flowers and two fly girls of the period. Everybody dolled up and smiling but possessing that precocious dignity of your ancestors when they were young.

“If I knew where he was at, Councilman, I would tell you, straight up,” Archy said. “But I don’t know. By choice. And I don’t plan to find out.”

“And you don’t know anybody knows where he’s living. Not one single soul.”

He might have been gently chiding Archy for this ignorance. Implying there could, somewhere, for somebody, still be some use left in Luther Stallings.

“Nope. No, sir, no, I don’t.”

“Well, let’s say that situation changes, or maybe you have some kind of change in the way you’re looking at that situation. Say, one day you gaze out at the neighborhood water. See that fin popping up, that old familiar shark come swimming around. Just, you know, let me know. I have something to give him. Something he needs very badly.”

“Yeah? What, a sea lion?”

Flowers fixed his sleepy eyes on Archy, laid them on like hands. Slowly, skeptically, the heavy lids lifted. “I am serious, now,” he said. “You run across him or one of his known associates and running buddies. Somebody from his old crew that ain’t died yet, few in number as they are. Just let me know. Valletta Moore, for example. I heard she’s around.”

He came at Archy’s soul then with the flashlight and the crowbar of his gaze. Archy offered no purchase and gave nothing back. Maybe the man already knew that Archy had seen Valletta; maybe he was only fishing. Archy could not have said why he decided to keep silent.

“If she should happen to show up,” Flowers said, “let’s say. You just go on and call me on my personal cell. Feyd, give him the number. All right? Will you do that for me?”

Archy said, “I’ll think about it.”

“You do that,” Flowers said. “And maybe, you never know, I might be the one ends up putting in a word for you with Mr. G Bad.”

“Is that right?”

“It’s not out of the question, by any means.”

“‘Community relations,’ huh.”

“The new Dogpile store, I have been reliably told, is going to have the most extensive, most encyclopedic, jazz section of any store in the country. Also hip-hop. R and B. Blues. Gospel. Soul. Funk. Somebody will have to run that department, Mr. Stallings.”

Archy had a choice: Let the significance of these words sink in, or shed it at once without even giving it a try, like a dog encouraged to wear a hat. “Satan,” he said, smiling. “Get thee behind me.”

Behind him there was only a snort from Feyd, or maybe it was Bankwell.

“Up to you, of course. Baby on the way,” Flowers said. “Time you started making some real money. Get yourself that fat package of benefits they’re paying.”

“He could offer me a ride in the Dogpile blimp,” Archy said. “I am not for sale.”

“I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.”

“Living in a dreamland,” Bankwell suggested.

“Indeed,” said Flowers. “But the rent is coming due.”

“Hey, yeah, no, I really want to thank you,” Archy said, getting to his feet. “You really helped me organize my thinking about Brokeland all of a sudden. I appreciate it.”

“Did I?” Flowers’s turn to sound leery, doubting the trend of Archy’s thinking. “How so?”

“You made me realize, we have to do the funeral at the store. Push back all the record bins, how we have them on those wheels, you know? We can fit all kinds of people in there. Just like for the dances we used to put on.” It was not easy, dressed in skanky b-ball shorts and a Captain EO sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves, but Archy dived down deep and hauled up all the dignity he could snap loose from the sea bottom of his soul. “Councilman, you made me realize, thank you, but me and Mr. Jones and Nat Jaffe and our kind of people, we already got a church of our own. You, too, seemed like at one time, up to not too long ago, a member in good standing. And that church is the church of vinyl.”

“The church of vinyl,” Flowers said, looking half persuaded. But he shook his head and made a snuffling sound of amusement or disgust. “Well, well.”

Archy turned and left the office without looking to the Bankwell side or to the Feyd, admiring as he passed between them the echo of his own phraseology as it lingered in his ears.

“You see that fin in the water, now,” Flowers called after him. “You just go on and holler out.”

Wide as the abyss and rumbling like doom, the El Camino rolled into the street of forsaken toys and came to a stop in front of the house. Shudder, cough, soft bang; then the whole afternoon suffused with an embarrassed silence. Late afternoon in late August, the sky limited only by the hills and the imminent wall of night. Palm tree, sycamore trees, soaked in shadow. Slouch-hat bungalows blazing sunshine at their crowns. Archy took it all in with the ardor of a doomed man. Not that he believed himself to be in any danger or was dying in any but the slowest and most conventional of ways. The clarity and sweetness of the evening, the light and the way it made his chest ache, were only the effects of mild panic, panic both moral and practical.

When he got out of the car, the evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. He stood on the sidewalk in front of his house. The El Camino’s engine sighed and muttered to itself, settling. A toddler archaeologist searched the sandbox with a red shovel. Probably come up with some ancient bit of toy legend, a Steve Austin head, the head of an Oscar Goldman. Six million ways I use to run it. He would tell Gwen about Titus. After that there would be other things to say to various other