Telegraph Avenue

“Get rid of all this vinyl, put a few barber chairs in here, place looks pretty much the same,” Goode said. He took out and opened a tin of Flow-brand breath mints, which he had long had a deal to endorse, and offered one to Nat, who shook his head. “Pretty much.”

“Stick around,” Nat said. “You can come to the second COCHISE meeting, it’s at noon.”

“Noon? What’s the holdup?” Goode said without missing a beat. “Sounds to me like y’all been having meetings every five motherfucking minutes around here.”

“I might like to have a meeting right now,” Nat said. “Archy? Partners’ meeting? Open to the general public. Stick around for that, at least, G Bad.” He gestured to Walter and Taku outside the window. “They can come, too.”

“Nat—”

“You, what, you here to offer Archy a job?”

Goode saw how it was, that Nat knew nothing, had heard nothing from Archy. “That’s between he and I.” He smiled. “I’m the competition. I don’t need to tell you what I plan to do.”

“Plan to or already did?”

“He offered me a job, Nat,” Archy said. “Manager of the music department.”

“The Beats Department, I believe it’s to be called.”

“That is correct,” Goode said.

“Manager,” Nat said. “Hey, that’s great. Congratulations.”

“I didn’t say yes.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Well, did you say no?”

Goode taking it all in, scanners lit and feeding information to the option-running brain.

“At one point,” Archy said. “Maybe not definitively.”

Nat hooked a thumb in Archy’s direction. “Get used to that kind of thing,” he told Goode.

Archy felt blood in his cheeks, the shame of the ponderer in a world that urged decision. A deliberator nipped at and harried by the hounds of haste. Professing in his heart like some despised creed the central truth of life: The only decision a man will never regret is the one he never made.

“How about that old man of yours,” Goode said. “Mr. Strutter. He ever turn up again?”

The question caught Archy off guard, Luther a pot he thought he had slapped a lid onto one time already that morning. He began to understand, though not yet to accept, that sooner or later his father—out there scheming, rolling some kind of Julie Jaffe?style D&D dice—would have to be faced, dealt with.

“Not that I know of,” he said, trying to figure where Goode was going with this line of questioning.

“Your father?” Nat said. “How is he mixed up in all this?”

“You know our mutual friend Brother Flowers going to find him,” Goode said. “With or without your help. Got all his people, got those nephews, out there looking everywhere. Lot of folks owing Brother Flowers something, could find themselves able to wipe out a lot of debt real fast. Come up with a house number. Name of a motel.”

“So be it,” Archy said. “Whatever. I can’t go there, you know?”

“No?

“No, man, I can’t think about that now.”

“You might want to start soon.”

Goode’s tone was cool, matter-of-fact, unconcerned with the fate or the whereabouts of Luther Stallings, and Archy saw, catching up at last, that the warning was directed at him. Goode was trying to remind him that the job offer with Dogpile had been, and remained, conditional on his helping Flowers track Luther down.

“I surely will,” Archy said. “I will start thinking about it, sure enough. The day after tomorrow.”

A beautiful phrase to the ponderer, the day after tomorrow. The address of utopia itself.

“Okay, let me try for one second to pretend like I understand,” Nat said. “Not only do you, Archy, not plan to help me get out in front of this thing, reach out to the neighborhood, start pressing the city, the Planning Commission, on the DEIR, so forth? But you are actively considering going to work for this guy at Dogpile. Do I have that right?”

“You might,” Archy said. “Or perhaps you might not.”

“Archy, what the fuck?”

“Nat,” Archy said, “for a good many years, I have been trying as hard as I can, and in good faith, to answer your rhetorical questions. Today, just this one time, I’m afraid this particular rhetorical question is going to have to comport itself in the traditional manner, which I believe is to not need an answer from me or from anyone.”

“Arch,” Nat said, and for the first time his eyes, his voice, betrayed a certain desperation, a wince of genuine pain. “I need you. You can’t just sit this out. We have to actively oppose this asshole.”

“Seriously?” Goode said, showing pain himself, though it was the broader, more universal pain of reckoning with fools. “You going to do that, Stallings? Cost this neighborhood where you grew up, like, two-fifty, three hundred good-paying jobs? I don’t know how much in revenue, tax base? Neighborhood revitalization? Sense of pride?”

“Maybe,” Archy said, soothing himself with the feel of the words, two cool sides of a smooth round stone between his fingers. “Maybe not. For the time being, I have a neutral stance.”

“Oh, uh-huh,” Goode said. “Okay.”

“Fuck that,” Nat said. At last he abandoned the pretense of bookkeeping, closed the cover on the three-level checkbook, slapped his pencil down. Pouring himself off the high stool like Snoopy going from vulture to snake. “No, you don’t. I mean it, Archy. Either you are fucking me over here, or you are helping me out. Which is it?”

Archy and his brown shoes made their way around the counter, and he brushed up close against Nat, taking some kind of ugly satisfaction in the way his partner stepped back. Even though he knew that Nat was far from a physical coward, had gotten his hothead self into more fights and public dustups than Archy over the years by a factor of ten. Archy activated all the force fields of coolth, calm, and collectedness built in to the circuitry of his Iron Man armor. Nothing to fight about, no need for alarm. He took down the framed copy of Redbonin’ that he had hung on the wall the day of the first COCHISE meeting. He propped the frame on its bottom edge along the counter, opened the triangular foot cut into the cardboard backing, angled it so that the photograph of Mr. Jones’s freckled face, looking young and fierce, could stare down Gibson Goode. The disc itself stood among the hold items on the shelf behind the register in its paper sleeve. Archy slid it out, held it up to the window, watching the daylight flow like water across the shimmer of the grooves. A Very Fine example of a scarce release, believed to be among the smallest runs of all CTI pressings. He laid the record on the turntable’s platter and cued the first track, a cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar.

Cochise Jones always liked to play against your expectations of a song, to light the gloomy heart of a ballad with a Latin tempo and a sheen of vibrato, root out the hidden mournfulness, the ache of longing, in an up-tempo pop tune. Cochise’s six-minute outing on the opening track of Redbonin’ was a classic exercise in B-3 revisionism, turning a song inside out. It opened with big Gary King playing a fat, choogling bass line, sounding like the funky intro to some ghetto-themed sitcom of the seventies, and then Cochise Jones came in, the first four drawbars pulled all the way out, giving the Lloyd Webber melody a treatment that was not cheery so much as jittery, playing up the anxiety inherent in the song’s title, there being so many thousand possible ways to Love Him, so little time to choose among them. Cochise’s fingers skipped and darted as if the keys of the organ were the wicks of candles and he was trying to light all of them with a single match. Then, as Idris Muhammad settled into a rolling burlesque-hall bump and grind, and King fell into step beside him, Cochise began his vandalism in earnest, snapping off bright bunches of the melody and scattering it in handfuls, packing it with extra notes in giddy runs. He was ruining the song, rifling it, mocking it with an antic edge of joy. You might have thought, some critics felt, that the meaning or spirit of the original song meant no more to Cochise Jones than a poem means to a shark that is eating the poet. But somewhere around the three-minute mark, Cochise began to build, in ragged layers, out of a few repeated notes on top of a left-hand walking blues, a solo at once dense and rudimentary, hammering at it, the organ taking on a raw, vox humana hoarseness, the tune getting bluer and harder and nastier. Inside the perfectly