“And so alls I have to do in return for this generosity? Is come up with an address for my pops. Is that right? Let Bank and Feyd pay the man a visit so they can give Luther something he wants very badly.”
“I don’t know too much about that,” Goode said. “Don’t want to know. Less I have to do with Luther Stallings, the better.”
“You know him?”
From behind his
“We met,” G Bad said. “Brother came to see me, to be honest, I have to say, he actually did help me out with this Golden State deal. For real. But that was an accident, a side effect. Luther wasn’t trying to help nobody but himself.”
“You do know him.”
“I’ll say this: The man already got himself mixed up in it. Nothing you going to do can mix him up worse.”
“Mr. Goode,” Archy said. “Truly, I thank you for your generous offer, and how you took me up in your zeppelin, and fed me some truly delicious prawns. Oh, man! That hint of mole in the marinade? But even if I, like, followed my general lifelong policy and left the old man out of it? I already
“By this time next year,” Goode said, “you won’t have a store. You know that. You already dipping one wing in the water. I got three storage units in West Covina, any one of them carries inventory bigger and just as motherfucking deep as what you and your partner have on offer, at an average of three to five dollars less per disc, not to mention all the new music, too. Compilations, box sets, books and video relating to music, I open my doors four blocks away from you with all that, you are through.”
“No doubt,” Archy said, turning away from Goode to face the wide strip of windows at the front of the car.
“Aw,” Goode said. “You’re just being
“I have proven that many times in my life,” Archy agreed.
Gibson Goode joined Archy at the front window. They had turned east of north, and a great barren stretch of empty land forked with silver stretched out below them.
“That’s Port Chicago down there,” Goode said. “You know about that?”
“Yeah. Munitions ship exploded in World War II. Killed a mess of black sailors. Had to work as longshoremen in the Jim Crow navy. My grandfather was there, he got blinded, burned his lungs. Died like a year later.”
“My mom’s uncle was left deaf in both ears,” G Bad said. “Standing outside having a cigarette on a cargo pier almost a mile away.”
“I heard it was really a A-bomb,” Walter said. “That’s what I heard.”
Archy had heard this, too. A test bomb, pre-Hiroshima, that detonated prematurely as it was being loaded on a ship bound for some Pacific atoll. The whole thing covered up without too much trouble, all the victims of the blast being black, with no recourse except to keep on being dead. He did not entirely disbelieve it, thinking of the breast cancer that afterward clustered in Marin County, in the women of his family.
“Fireball was three miles wide,” Goode said. “Air was filled with burning Negroes falling out of the sky. Only thing they ever did wrong was try too hard and work too fast to fight somebody else’s war.”
“It was their war,” Archy said.
“Maybe. And Oakland was their town. Our town.”
“Giving me a history lesson,” Archy observed. “Going to tell me now’s my chance to make history as the presidente for life of the Cochise Jones Department of the Oakland Dogpile Thang. And strike a blow for the race by bailing out on my white oppressor, on the Man who was forcing my granddaddy to load so many carpet bombs so fast that he came raining down in pieces.”
“I might of been headed in that direction,” Goode said, rubbing his chin, little crooked smile. “Be honest, I was pretty much scrambling.”
“Got me up here with my old running buddy. Put those classic sounds on through an excellent system, maybe have too much bottom in your EQ settings, but whatever. Start me reminiscing about Luke Cage, House of Wax. Feed me all that good food. Playing on my nostalgia
“So forget about the mission, Turtle,” Walter said. “It’s a damn job.” He had stationed himself on a bench at the precise center of the gondola, equidistant and out of view of all the windows. “Take it or don’t. Sooner you say something, sooner we can land this motherfucker.”
“It is a job,” Goode said. “And from what I understand, congratulations are in order, right? Got a baby on the way? Based on my observations of what you have going on down there at Brokeland Records, you all living up to the name so well, I’d say you might soon be looking for any kind of job. Forget about a sweet opportunity like this one, which, furthermore, as I tried to explain, has a chance to give you something important and meaningful to do with your life. Make your son proud of you.”
His son. Goode meant the unborn one, possibly a daughter who would be highly likely not to give anything resembling a fuck about the transition of the James Brown band from the Bernard Odum to the Bootsy Collins era; but Archy thought at once of Titus, face like a false panel, some unknown and possibly hostile intelligence peering out at his father and the world through the Judas holes of his eyes. Archy had only to consult the map of his own feelings toward the father who had abandoned him to know that a feeling of filial pride was the farthest kingdom, unreachable, beyond deserts and ice caps and seas. A job. A baby. Sons, daughters, wives, and lovers. Paychecks and payrolls.
“How far you can go in this thing?” Archy said abruptly, as they sailed beyond the void of dust and brackish silver where seven hundred Negroes had come to grief. Bearing for Mount Lassen, the Yukon, the moon.
“Huh?” Goode said.
“What’s the effective range?”
“On a tank of fuel? Five hundred miles. Except for gas and supplies, I mean, she don’t ever have to come down.”
“That sounds good,” Archy said. “That sounds like a plan.”
III. A Bird of Wide Experience
If sorrow is the consequence of pattern spoiled, then the bird was grieving, seeking comfort in the patter and tap of the baby’s shoes against the wooden floor, Rolando whaling away like Billy Cobham with the heels of his little Air Jordans, working himself around the room on his back, a human dust mop making a knight’s tour of the emptied-out living room, brown eyes grooving with vacant fixity all the while on the red tail feather and black eyebead of the parrot, for whose care, removal, or ultimate disposition no instructions had been given to Rolando’s mother when she was directed to clear out the place by the executor of the Cochise Jones estate, a modest affair carefully depleted by sixty-plus years of foolishness, most of what remained of it tied up in vinyl records, the rest in vintage leisure suits (Aisha had counted twenty-two), the fatal Hammond, a Yamaha keyboard on a cross-legged metal stand, furniture fit only for the Ashby BART flea market, and the Antarctic architecture of Mr. Jones’s so- called files, towers and peaks and drifts of paper everywhere, which Aisha shoveled into cardboard banker boxes— gas bills, doctor bills, communications from Musicians Local 6, photos of people who meant nothing to Aisha, a photo of Mr. Jones at the front counter of his favorite haunt saying something that was making Archy Stallings smile his big slow smile, door-hanger menus, bank statements of the mid-nineties, medical and insurance documents, the yellowing ongoing history of Mr. Jones’s battles against record labels and their departments of legal affairs—before turning at last, with a sinking heart, to the parrot, Fifty-Eight, wordless during the whole time that Aisha had devoted to sorting out the old man’s belongings, the bird expressing itself only by emitting a throaty musical purr that put her in mind of the old Wurlitzer organ at her church, singing or playing—or neither or both—an instrumental
