Telegraph Avenue

across the Bay Bridge, from what I have been told, he came originally from Stockton or Fresno.”

“Modesto,” Julie said.

“Modesto, still worse. Driving up to San Francisco as a young man to drink espresso coffee and experience French cinema, then returning in the small hours of the night to Modesto, which is a real armpit, I am attesting personally to that. And this, you see, was the inspiration for the AT-AT walking machines of the Star Wars films.”

“Cool,” Titus said, taking his eyes off the Toronado long enough to relive those giant legs astride the ice of Hoth, those darting starfighters trailing cable from their spinnerets. “Hold, hold up.”

They had come to a stretch of old rail yard where the buildings had been maintained and even renewed. In the trackless void of concrete, a number of metal sheds and depots huddled together around one immense train barn, like a feudal stronghold. A totem pole of signs advertised the services of welders, makers of specialty furniture, tool cutters, fiberglass fabricators and, at the foot of the pole, Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs. As the Toronado rolled, popping gravel, into the commons and slowed, its fits and spasms increased. It executed a kind of drunken rumba toward one of three open bay doors in the front of Motor City Auto Body, heaved itself halfway into the bay, and then, with one final shake of its castanets, died. The Toronado’s driver got out, and the shadow of Valletta Moore slid across the front bench to take the wheel.

He wore a Raiders jersey, number 78 with the name SHELL across the shoulders. Kung fu pants, some kind of sandals or leather flip-flops. He was carrying a long billy club, a kung fu bo—no, it was a walking stick—twirling it like an old-school beat cop.

“Okay. I am now leaving,” Mr. Singh announced as Stallings emerged from the car swinging his truncheon thing. “And I am taking you with me, no charge.”

Stallings did not look in their direction or appear to notice the taxicab at all. He came around the back of the spavined Toronado and studied its trunk for an instant. Then he raised the walking stick, reared back on his long scarecrow shanks, and gently thrust the stick against the circular keyhole in the lid of the trunk. He bent one knee, gave his wrist a twist, and either by means of qi or pure panache—should there prove any difference—gave the Toronado a baby push. It rocked back, then surged forward and rolled the rest of the way into the body shop. With Blofeldian alacrity, a steel door rolled down behind it. Luther Stallings stood studying the sealed steel door as though it allegorized something. Then he whipped around and pointed the end of his cane at the Crown Victoria.

“Ho, shit,” Titus said.

Mr. Singh and Julie came to rapid agreement on the advisability of their turning around now and driving as far as Mr. Singh felt twenty-one dollars would go.

Before Mr. Singh could put the car in drive, Titus got out. He took from his shirt pocket a small number of bills folded tight with origami precision. It might have been a packet containing some kind of sterilized pad. He unpleated a twenty and handed it, halfway to a peace crane, to Mr. Singh. “I got this,” he said.

Julie climbed out of the taxi. Titus had never paid for anything before.

“Here is my card,” Mr. Singh said, passing an oblong imprinted with his name, his contact information, and the surprising avocation of PUNJABI CHEF.

“Okay,” Julie said, too awed or afraid or embarrassed to mention that while he traveled with a portable eight-track player, he did not own a cell phone. “Thanks.”

He reached into his Johnny Depp wallet and pulled out one of his business cards at random and had already handed it to Mr. Singh before he noticed it was the one that read:

JULIUS L. JAFFE

libertine

This was a word he had encountered in the pornographic Victorian novels kept by his mother in a shoebox in her closet, among the ordinary shoeboxes. It was less pragmatic though no less hopeful a declaration of calling than Mr. Singh’s. The Punjabi chef eyed the card, then glanced over at Luther Stallings. Leaning on the cane, Stallings had begun slowly to walk in the general direction, without any set goal, of Titus. Mr. Singh’s mustache did a slow hula over his pursed lips as he contemplated Julie’s card. Then, with a number of backward looks, Mr. Singh turned his taxicab around and drove away.

The libertine without portfolio came up alongside his friend, who had fallen, perhaps helplessly, into an arrant imitation of his grandfather’s trademark gait, intensified by whatever injury or infirmity required the use of a cane, so accurate it verged on mockery. Stallings angled his head to one side, sizing Titus up; Titus hitched his to the same inquisitive angle. Neither of them appeared to notice that Titus was running a Harpo Marx on Stallings.

“Huh,” Stallings said, and Titus duly said, “Huh.”

Stallings’s hair was densely threaded with ashy gray. There was a good deal less flesh on him than in his heyday. His teeth had not done well; some were lost. Otherwise he seemed okay, not obviously fucked up or sick, and if he was not looking quite so fine as his former costar, he was in far better shape than his Oldsmobile; a state fairly close, all in all, to the original, right down to the chill twinkle in the conman eye. The shoes on his sockless feet were not sandals, Julie saw, or flip-flops, but Chinese cloth slippers, the kind sold out of tubs in Chinatown for five dollars a pair. The kung fu pants had the sheen of doll pajamas or a cheap Halloween costume. Without taking his eyes off Titus, he raised the outstretched walking stick. Leveled it, in a broad sweep, at Julie, the tip of it unwavering, locked as though dowsing at Julie’s soul, a move right out of Witchfinder General. Julie found himself blushing deeply, as if his pockets held henbane and mandragora.

“Who’s the white boy?” Stallings asked Titus.

Julie did not catch the reply, it was tendered so softly.

“It’s who?” Stallings said. Not angry, not impatient, not unwilling yet to suffer fools or boys who muttered, but ready to go in any of these directions if need be.

“My friend,” Titus said loudly, ashamed.

Stallings lowered the cane and checked Julie out, once vertically, once horizontally, the process leaving him unconvinced if not outright skeptical. “Your ‘friend,’” he said, as if Titus had claimed that Julie was his invisible potato or his talking blue ankylosaurus.

“What they want?”

Valletta Moore stood in the second garage bay. She had her hand tucked inside her red handbag.

“Archy’s my father,” Titus said.

“Archy Stallings?”

“Yes, sir.”

“For real? You my grandson?”

Titus nodded.

“Boy got kids all over town,” Valletta said.

Luther came in a hurry, with a destination. Titus went stiffly into his grandfather’s arms. Holding back. But he went. Luther Stallings—at one time, many, many years earlier, a viable pretender to the fiercely disputed title of Toughest Black Man in the World—brushed away a few ill-suited tears.

“Well, goddamn.”

He let go of Titus, stepped away, and cleared his throat. He took hold of the silver-tipped head of his cane with both hands and planted it square on the ground in front of him. Looked down the avenue across the barren expanse of the old depot, then up the other way where there was not much to see, at first glance, but razor wire and morning glory in wild contention. And sky. Lots of sky, torn into scraps of silver and blue. Eighteen-wheelers like beads on an endless strand, creeping along the flyovers toward the docks. And containers stacked everywhere you looked, painted with names that sounded to Julie like the names of opponents in Street Fighter: “K” Line, Yang Ming, Maersk, Star. Beyond that the gray planes and facets of San Francisco.

“Best get inside,” Luther said.

Titus started toward the garage. Stallings turned to Julie, who hesitated, paralyzed by a ridiculous fear that Valletta Moore might be keeping a gun in her handbag. Afraid, too, of the man with the cane, of this nether zone of Oakland, of certain shadows in the garage that he saw gathering into the shape of man, large and portly, with fearsome mustaches somewhere between biker king and generalissimo.