miked Leslie amplifier, the treble horn whirled, and the drivers fired, and you heard the song as the admission of failure it truly was, a confession of ignorance and helplessness. And then in the last measures of the song, without warning, the patented Creed Taylor strings came in, mannered and restrained but not quite tasteful. A hint of syrup, a throb of the pathetic, in the face of which the drums and bass fell silent, so that in the end it was Cochise Jones and some rented violins, half a dozen mournful studio Jews, and then the strings fell silent, too, and it was just Mr. Jones, fading away, ending the track with the startling revelation that the song was an apology, an expression, such as only the blues could ever tender, of limitless regret.
Archy pressed the button that raised the tonearm of the Marantz 6300 he had restored to its veneer and steel glory after Nat rescued it from a curbside trash heap in Montclair. In the silence that followed, he returned disc to sleeve, sleeve to album.
“Nat,” Archy said, “I’m sorry. I know I am the most unhelpful, indecisive, useless partner you could have. And Mr. Goode, I apologize for how rude and how ungrateful I probably seem to you regarding your generous offer. But right now, and for the next forty-eight hours, until I see that man safe and resting peaceful in the ground?” With both hands, like a ring-card girl, he raised the record high, flashing the face of Mr. Jones now at Nat, now at G Bad. “Fuck both of y’all.”
He nodded to himself as much as to both his interlocutors and then, tucking the record up under his arm, set out, feeling mysteriously free, for the first time in days, of regret, ready for whatever might come, and bound, as ever, for the day after tomorrow.
A last morning flag of summer, blue banded with gold and peach, unfurled slowly over the streets as the two wanderers, denizens of the hidden world known to rogues, gamblers, and swordsmen as “the Water Margin,” made their way along the Street of Blake toward the ancestral stronghold of the Jew-Tang Clan, its gables armored in cedar shakes faded to the color of dry August hills. Armed merely with subtle weapons of loneliness, they left behind them, like a trail of dead, the disappointment of their tenure at the School of the Turtle. They were little more than boys, and yet while they differed in race, in temperament, and in their understanding of love, they were united in this: The remnant of their boyhood was a ballast they wished to cut away. And still boyhood operated on their minds, retaining all its former power to confound wishes with plans.
“I ain’t staying. Just so you know. Not hanging around.”
“Just a couple of days.”
“Not even.”
“Well, just till we get some money.”
“I can get some money today. How much you got?”
“A hundred and seven dollars.”
“Huh.”
“A hundred and eight. I mean, it’s probably enough for the bus, but—”
“Bus will be like maybe a hundred.”
Their wish, wearing its mask of planning, was to seek out a legendary master in his hidden sanctuary among the deserts of the south and offer their blades to his service. The journey would be long and fraught with peril and was soberly considered impossible, but one of the boys had mastered the kung fu of desperation and the other the kung fu of love, and armed with these ancient techniques, they passed untouchable, protected from knowledge of the certainty of failure. At any rate, it was the end of summer, a season when the wishes of fourteen-year-old boys are wont to turn heedless of the facts. So they had returned to the house where one of the young men had been raised, in the time before he embraced the bitterness and romance of the Water Margin, hoping to find, by theft or pilferage, provision for their journey to the south.
“I would have had more than a hundred and eight dollars, only, like a fuckhead, I bought that stupid Viking helmet at the Solano Stroll back in April.”
“How much that thing cost?”
“Two hundred and twenty-five. Yeah, I know.”
“Damn.”
“I know. But, I mean, those are real horns. From a real bull.”
“Don’t even really fit you.”
“I have a freakishly big head.”
“Anyway, Viking helmets didn’t
“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t know you back then.”
“Whatever. I can get the money. If I have to do some, I don’t know, maybe some robbing, or, like, I know the combination of the safe where my auntie keep her money. So, yeah.”
“She keeps it in a safe?”
“Big heavy one. She got to, living in that house. She has almost, maybe, three hundred, three-fifty she been saving up to buy a new wig. Like a human-hair wig. Hair comes from India, they got these temples, you shave your head and it’s, what’s it, a sacrifice. I just get up inside that safe…”
“You know the combination?”
“I know everything but the last number. And the dial only goes up to fifty-nine, so.”
They approached the Jew-Tang stronghold with the stalking diffidence of cats, employing techniques of Silence and Lightness. In spite of their precautions and the intensity of focus they brought to bear, as they crept around to the back, they felt themselves observed.
“What in God’s name?”
“Oh. Hey, Mom.”
The matriarch of the clan stood at a kitchen window overlooking the back garden. It was known that she could see through shadows, whether in the corners of the world or of the human heart. At the mere sound of her voice, trained along with her eyes and ears by years of merciless study of the tendency of men and plans to go awry, the grand enterprise they had mutually proposed during the flight from the School of the Turtle fell to improbable pieces in her son’s mind. The young men turned to gaze up at her, awful in the slanting light, dressed in sober habiliments as though to go before some tribunal, probing their souls with her picklock gaze. In one hand she held a cup and in the other the strip of transparent little boxes in which she stored her mysterious week of pills, the crushed and bitter formulations from which she derived many of the strange powers for which she was legendary.
“He, uh, we got kicked out,” said her son.
“We’re fine,” said the other.
“Kicked out?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Yes,” said her son.
All the ancient schools of lying, in their mountain fastnesses, and all the techniques they taught were of no avail against this subtle matriarch with the unbeatable kung fu of her Nine Intensities Steel Gaze. The only hope for escape, her son knew, was to tell a version of the truth, to scoot your lie beneath the fingertips of her attention under a sheepskin of truth and pray for an instant of blindness.
“But, just, only for today,” said her son. “Carpet cleaning.”
“Archy is having his carpet cleaned.”
“Yeah.”
“I see. Turn it down?”
“What?”
“Can you please turn it down? What
“Return to Forever.”
“Yeesh. Thank you. And what’s with the, uh, luggage?”
“The washing machine is broken. We came over to do T’s laundry.”
The one denoted by that mystic initial nodded, but it was plain to the son that the mother disbelieved every word of the story, as she likely also would have done had he been telling the truth.
“They had a fight,” tried her son, hoisting his tattered scrap of sheepskin higher. “Him and Archy.”
“He.”
“He and Archy had a fight. Archy kicked him out.”
