you—”
“When did I ever—”
“—but I want you, okay, to take a minute—or, honestly, given the fact that we have been married for seventeen years, take two seconds and ask yourself if I would be willing to go to prison for that simple belief.”
“No need to ask,” Nat said. “I’m going to start stocking up on files for the cakes.”
She smiled and punched him on the shoulder, hard, not without affection.
“Ow.”
“Asshole.”
The genie had drained, a dark smoky funnel, back down into the mouth of its flask. She tamped the stopper and dropped the bottle into some deep irretrievable abyss where it belonged.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to vent.”
“I get it.”
“I had to say it to somebody.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” he said.
“That’s your job.”
“Great,” he said. “Pretty soon I’ll be able to go full-time.”
For the first time she caught the note of sorrow in his voice, something catching at the back of his throat.
“Hey,” she said. “Honey, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just a fucking record store.”
“This is sacred ground,” the old man was saying, or words to that effect. Titus, to be honest, was only half listening, or put it this way: He was listening as hard as he could but to a different story. A bigger story, The Titus Joyner Story as it culminated, for now at least, here. Here in the fluorescent chill of this funky old lost-Atlantis grotto of a body shop, Motor City Auto Body and Custom Jobs having turned out to be a cabinet of wonders, the final resting place of Inca submarines and Nazi saucers and the death- ray cannons of ancient Egypt. Here where, from steel hooks along two of the cinder-block walls, there hung the bones, hides, and organs of legendary whips—grilles, slabs, chrome intricacies looted or preserved from dozens of monstrous automobiles. Here where, beside the long wall opposite the rolling steel doors, a Smithsonian of parts and hardware stood racked and labeled in bins, baskets, and pin drawers. Here. Now. Hiding out in the shadow of the AT-ATs on the ice world of Hoth. Co-conspiring in the secret lair of Cleon Strutter and Candygirl Clark to hit the vaults of his impregnable self and rob them of the treasure that he had been guarding for so long. With the whole of that guarded and time-locked heart, then, Titus was listening. Not to the science that Luther Stallings was dropping but to the mysterious story of his own life from this moment forward, a tangled tale of which the old man’s rambling lecture formed a mere strand in the overall weave. “Holy ground. Oakland, California. End of the dream. End of the motherfucking line.”
“But not the end of the lecture,” said Valletta Moore, and under her breath, almost but not quite below the human hearing frequency, “Apparently.”
She perched on a bar stool, hunched like a jeweler over an upturned steel drum that was covered in a cut sheet of glitter-flecked upholstery vinyl, in the “office” that had been carved out of the back corner of the echoey cinder-block barn by means of two grease-furred sofas, a wooden rolltop desk, and a filing cabinet, under a poster of a mad orange hot-rod pickup truck advertising something called the House of Kolor. Valletta had a white earbud tucked into the ear that was farthest from Luther, and the near one dangled as she leaned to study the little tools and bottles spread across the glittery tablecloth: Everything she needed to execute custom work on her fingernails. From time to time she lowered a pair of half-glasses from her forehead to the bridge of her nose but refused to keep them there for longer than a few seconds at a time. A veddy-dry British man droned from the speaker of the neglected earbud, narrating all about The Autobiography of Miss Jane Marple or some such shit. The submarine cave of Valletta Moore’s cleavage, glimpsed through the open collar of her shirt, a further, smaller Atlantis lost in freckles and rumors of cranberry lace, formed another vivid tangle in the tale of Titus Joyner.
“Man has a audience,” said the old roly-poly Mexican or Spaniard or whatever he was. Owner of the place, Sixto Cantor. Mustached face made out of orange rocks seamed together like the Thing in the Fantastic Four, slung wide as the cars by which he got his living, thick white hair streamlined back into a swan, the fin on some heap of the Fonzie years. Across the name patch of his blue coverall, it said EDDIE in red script. Behind the prescription lenses of black safety glasses with cheese-grater sides, Eddie’s eyes patrolled like fighting fish in a tank. At least one of those eyes, at any given moment, was on the crew of six over in the first bay, three Latinos, two black guys, and a little punk-rock body-art dude, who were busy gutting some gray eighties box, maybe a Citation. Just feeding on the thing like a swarm of piranhas. “We gonna be here all night.”
“Yeah, well, I’m talking about the nighttime,” the old man said. “So that’s okay. ‘History is made at night,’ Henry Ford said that. That is what they mean when they talk about the American Dream.”
While he professed, Luther Stallings lay on the floor on his back, stripped to his white kung fu pajama pants, balanced at the tailbone on a foam rubber mat, snapping off stomach crunches by the hundred. Bicycle crunches, twisting crunches, rope climbs, the steady scissoring pulse of it marking the progress of a lecture interrupted only by an occasional wince as his hip bone cracked or by the odd snort of impatience from Valletta Moore. Every time Titus glanced over at Julie, boy was watching the ripple and swell of the old man’s abdominals, the play underneath that leather stitched tight as the rolls in a bucket seat. Julie looking half queasy, half hypnotized, as if watching a sneaker go around inside a clothes dryer. “Everything got started for us, minute the white man wanted to get some sleep on a train.”
The discourse had been riding this particular local for most of the past fifteen, twenty minutes, The Secret History of the Black Man in California According to Luther Stallings, the old man backing up his claims with cites and quotes drawn from irrefutable authorities whose names always seemed to be on the verge of being divulged or else, when spoken aloud, meant nothing to Titus. Claim Number One, front and center, being something along the lines of how, when you tunneled deep, the way the old man had done during the long years of his exile, going way on down into the mines of knowledge, Oakland was literally the Land of Dreams. After that, well, between the growling and barking of the air compressor, the ceaselessness of the trash being talked by the Motor City crew, the sight of what appeared to be the right (i.e., Robin-side) door of the Batmobile from the old-school TV show hanging hooked like a side of beef in the far corner of the garage, and the undersea world whose gates parted every time Valletta Moore bent over to French the tip of another fingernail, frankly, Titus did not follow it too closely, though he understood and even felt prepared to endorse the view that the Secret History of the Black Man in California truly was all tied up with the sleep and sleeplessness, the insomnia and dreams of the white man. Because, because, hmm, something about how white folks back in the day, needing to catch their beauty sleep as they traveled west subjugating and conquering, turned to a man named Pullman. And this one white dude, Joe, no, George Pullman, turned right around and, not out of any kind of wanting to do the right thing but only because he was cheap and needed an instant pool of skilled but low-pay servants, started hiring up free black men of the time and setting them to work tending to the slumber of white people. Punctuated by grunts that at times seemed to elide or bleep out the parts of what he was saying that would help it make some kind of sense, the old man evoked the nightly scene, vigilant black men studying the sonorous nocturnal rumblings of wealthy sleepers in the sleeper cars, dreamers rocking through the great western darkness toward the land of sunset, the far shore of the American Dream, which for reasons no doubt made clear during a particularly loud grunt, was all because the word “America” was actually a broken-down version of “Amenthe-Ra,” the Land of the West in Ancient Egypt, where you went when you died, though not in a train, of course, but in a boat, a westbound boat like those that had freighted the sorrows of the Pullman porters’ African ancestors, even though to the ancient Egyptians, the death journey to Amenthe-Ra was only a kind of sleep, in fact a dream—not Dream as in “I Have a Dream” but, rather, the strange journey taken every night by the sleeping human brain, although, as an aside, the connections were interesting, you had to wonder why Dr. King, whose father was a Prince Hall Mason, had chosen to couch his message using a term so central to the Secret History of Black Men in California, the language of the Pullman porter, raised up and set to rights and liberated while the white man was literally asleep.
