inability to holster said jimmy, for his last quarrel with Mr. Jones, for his choice of brown wing tips with a suit that had more blue in its glen plaid than he remembered. He cut the engine and sat, a hi-hat of regret, struck hard and resounding.
Just before the taco lady returned from running his deposit to take Archy off hold and inform him, employing a deft and broken phraseology, that the operation was a failure and his Visa card had not survived the procedure, Clifford Brown, Jr., came on KCSM to back-announce a cut he must have played before Archy got in the car, Freddie Hubbard’s 1970 cover of “Better Git It in Your Soul,” “featuring,” as Junior put it, “on the organ, Oakland’s late, great Mr. Cochise Jones,” and Archy found himself unexpectedly on the verge of tears. That verge was as close to tears as Archy usually allowed himself to come. Regret, hurt, bereavement, loss, to permit the flow of even one tear at the upwelling of such feelings was to imperil ancient root systems and retaining walls. Mudslide and black avalanche would result and drown him.
It was just something in the way Clifford Brown, Jr., said,
“I knew my card was hurting,” Archy conceded to the taco lady, weeping freely. “I did not know it was that sick.”
“Is okay,” the taco lady said, mistaking the wobble in his voice for simple grief over the loss of Mr. Jones, almost as loyal a customer of Sinaloa as he had been of Brokeland Records, prone to fall into an almost musical rapture at the spectacle of all those rotating slabs of glazed and crispy pork stacked on a spindle like tasty 45s. Or maybe she was making no mistake at all. “You pay me cash when you pick it up, okay? Day after tomorrow, eleven A.M.? Okay?”
Archy said that would be okay. He worked to get a grip on himself. Thinking of Tony Stark, Iron Man, with that shrapnel lodged in his heart’s scar tissue, doomed to a life encased in armor, flashing his repulsor rays. That Gwen’s departure may have stirred echoes of the death of Archy’s mother’s—FOOM! Repulsed. That if you went back in time and informed Archy Stallings, at the age of fourteen, one day his own son would be filled with nothing but reproach and contempt for the worthless man who had, Wile E. Coyote–style, left a hole in his life in the precise shape of a fleeing father—FOOM! Repulse the motherfucker.
“Day after tomorrow,” Archy said, wiping his cheek with the overly blue sleeve of his suit jacket.
Then Nat Jaffe beeped in on the other line.
“I’m a block away,” Archy told Nat.
It was forty-seven minutes past the hour of eleven, only about twelve minutes beyond the usual frontiers of Archy’s lateness, and he wished sincerely but without much hope that his partner was not planning on pitching him shit about it. Not this morning.
“You have a visitor,” Nat informed him, sounding cool if not frosty.
Dread took hold of Archy, mostly at the scalp, like the lining of a too-small hat. The number of available candidates for the role of Dreadful Visitor was more than sufficient to stock his premonition of doom, but at the core of the feeling sat the memory of a visit paid to his third- grade classroom by the school principal, during current events, on the Tuesday morning of his mother’s passing. After that day every visitor was, in prospect, Mr. Ashenbach, all news going to be bad. Enemies, lovers, hitherto unknown children, cops and
“Man by the name of Goode,” Nat said, the temperature of his tone dropping by another ten degrees Kelvin. “Says he’s a particular friend of yours. Came with his entourage.”
Turned out to be only Walter, skulking around in a five-hundred-dollar tracksuit behind that small moon.
“You fucking it up,” Walter confided to Archy in a murmur. Archy careful to have on his round tortoiseshell sunglasses, nobody going to catch Diz or Mingus crying over whatever stupid shit they might have done or left undone. “Don’t fuck it up.”
“I’m not,” Archy said.
“Don’t let your boy fuck it up, either.”
“Nat?”
“Man, what is his problem?”
“He being touchy?”
“Kind of like.”
“Dude can be touchy,” Archy said.
If upon first arriving at the store this morning, the affable Mr. Gibson “G Bad” Goode had, as might be imagined, attempted to exchange a few pleasantries with Mr. Nat “Royal Pain” Jaffe, by the time Archy walked into Brokeland, the two men no longer appeared to be on speaking terms. They had installed themselves at opposite ends of the store, Nat perched at the cash register, affecting to conduct a careful audit of some check stubs in a scarred black binder, Goode way at the back, fingering a strand of painted beads in the Miles Davis curtain while he flipped through the hip-hop bins. A sweet-sounding copy of
Goode spun around when Archy came through the door, but Nat just sat there, hunched on his stool like some high-collared miser out of Charles Dickens, crooked as a finger on a guitar string, humming like a struck length of wire.
“Yo, yo, yo,” Archy said. The hat of dread still gripped his brow, but he played things light and innocent, stalling for time as he sampled the atmosphere in the store, checked the thermometer, scanned the length of tape in the seismograph. Needles jigged. Gauges and meters all ran into the red.
“Mr. Stallings,” Gibson Goode said.
He stuck Roxanne Shante under his arm and rolled on the trucks of an invisible skateboard to the front of the store, wearing a thousand dollars’ worth of T-shirt and jeans. Archy considered a final burst of evasion, acting as if he had never met Gibson Goode, never flown in his zeppelin, could not imagine what might have brought the man into his little old Telegraph Avenue used-record store on this fine August afternoon. But no, the time had come. Archy needed to man up, take hold of himself. Confess that he had known a moment of weakness. That he was tempted by the offer to run the Beats Department, get a regular paycheck, boss some other folks around.
Then, when he opened his mouth, the usual tangle of lies and evasions came spooling out.
“Oh my goodness,” he said. “Look who it is! Nat, you know who this is?”
“I do, in fact.”
G Bad and Archy pitched the tent of a handshake over themselves, struck it, folded it up, put it away. Archy glanced over at his partner. Nat wore the look he got when he was listening to something amazing that was new to him. A fleer of analysis, like he was startled to learn that he could have missed this before, given that he knew everything about anything worth knowing.
“Check it out, Nat. Gibson Goode. In our store.”
“Totally.”
“I know you’re excited about that.”
“Yep.”
“Did you so express it to him?”
“Oh, he did, he did,” said Goode.
“You used to get your hair cut here, isn’t that right, now?” Archy put the question like an interviewer on
Nat looked up from the three-tier checkbook, betraying the mildest curiosity toward Goode. “Lot of folks got cut here,” Nat said amiably.
“Did
They clocked each other, their gazes two sets of radar guns.
“Before my time,” Nat said.
