Telegraph Avenue

They looked like they had been shaped with fine tools from a regal pair of antlers.

“You have an old friend,” Titus said, “man has that kind of money, but you sleeping in a garage.”

Valletta laughed a low, unhappy laugh and got up from the table where she had progressed from her fingernails to painting her toes. “Boy has sense,” she said. She tucked her feet into a pair of blue Dr. Scholl’s sandals and then went tocking across the cement floor to the bathroom door, on which some airbrush master had rendered a photoreal image of a Conan the Barbarian–type character in the style of Frank Frazetta, sitting on a toilet with his ax and his sword on the floor in front of him, squeezing out a shit with a look on his face of barbaric joy. “Must come from his momma’s side of things.” She slammed the bathroom door behind her.

“Boy, we are comfortable as hell here,” his grandfather said. “Truly. Not that I don’t hope to improve our situation. But I would prefer if you didn’t keep harping on it like that.”

The compressor clanged the entire building like a single great fire alarm reverberating in the rebar, the air itself ringing as though struck. The noise of it was starting to get on Julie’s nerves. Somebody had started to brew up a batch of a noxious substance needed for bodywork, and it smelled to Julie like burning bananas.

“I’m sorry,” Titus said. It was the first time Julie had ever heard him employ those words in that configuration.

“Man ain’t exactly a friend, is the answer to your question. Let’s just say, he and I, we have some history. Long time ago, back in the Jurassic Age.” He gestured toward the ruin of the Toronado. “Motherfucking dinosaurs roamed the earth.” He interrupted himself to chuckle at his self-mockery, then seemed to lose the thread, maybe recollecting those dinosaurian days. “Dude and me, we had our misunderstandings, know what I’m saying? Water has for sure flowed under the motherfucking bridge. But he’ll come through. Basically, he wants to keep up the prosperity as a local businessman, he has to come through, is the type of situation we’re talking about.”

It sounded sketchy to Julie, and he guessed, given what he knew about recent decades in the history of Luther Stallings, that it might have something to do with drugs. Maybe the reason that Luther had “taken a rap” and “done a bid” was so the mysterious old friend from the Jurassic Age could stay free, and now, by prior arrangement, it was time for him to repay Luther for “carrying the weight.” Or maybe, Julie thought, wildly quoting from his cinematic syllabus over the past week and forgetting that Luther was not a master thief and had only played a master thief in one semi-bad and one wretched movie, maybe it was like in The Getaway and the mystery “running buddy” had arranged to get Luther released from prison because he needed him for a job. The shadowy benefactor in Julie’s imagination took on a distinct resemblance to the actor Ben Johnson, so he was bewildered to hear Titus’s grandfather say, “Your pops knows him. Chan, Chandler Flowers, the undertaker.”

“I know him!” Julie said, startling himself along with Luther Stallings, who seemed inclined to forget that Julie was there. “He’s on the Oakland City Council. He’s a customer at Brokeland. He likes King Curtis.”

“King Curtis, Earl Bostic, Illinois Jacquet,” Luther Stallings agreed. “He loves all them honkers.”

“Chan the Man,” Julie said.

“So-called, so-called,” Luther said. “Old Chan, I tell you what, old Chan never was the flexible type. A stubborn, stiff-necked man. Eventually, I feel confident, he is going to come around.”

“You best hope he don’t, you old fool.”

Luther Stallings was caught as helplessly off guard as Julie and Titus. If it had been some hood or, like, Ben Johnson standing there with a .45, Luther would have been toast. So much for instincts honed by years of arcane martial arts training or by the harsh realities of prison life. Presently, Luther remembered to brandish his walking stick, but it was too late, and he knew it. Phantom slugs starred his head and torso with phantom squibs. He lowered the stick, looking disgusted. “Goddammit, Eddie!” he said. “What the hell kind of hidden refuge you running here?”

Eddie called back to him, offhand, bored, “Oh, yeah. You have a visitor.”

“Yo, what up, Ed?”

“Hey, Archy. How’s the whip?”

“Running well, looking good.”

“Baby?”

“No, nuh-uh, not yet. Julie, Titus. Go get in the motherfucking car.”

Julie had known Archy Stallings since he was four years old. He tried to remember if he had ever, in all that time, seen him angry twice in one day. Luther was smiling, or showing his teeth, anyway, a weird smile, as if he had lost money betting against some outcome that would be worse than losing. “Look at this,” he said. “Big shorty.”

A little white mint appeared for an instant in Archy’s mouth, surfing the curl of his tongue. “Boys,” he said. “Car.”

“Man, fuck you,” Titus said.

For the past little while, the hour, hour and a half they had spent at Motor City, rattled by the air compressor like bones in a blender, watching Eddie Cantor’s blowtorch pirates butcher the Citation so it could be rebuilt, that magic slaughter like something out of Norse Gods and Giants, hot rod dwarves intent on replacing its headlights with diamonds and its tires with wild boars and its engine with the heart of a dragon, Valletta Moore moving on from fingernails to toes, crooking one long leg against the steel drum, craning forward so the boys were granted a fitful vision of the shadowland between her legs, which forever afterward would remain confused in Julie’s retroimagination with the vision of his homeland articulated by Luther Stallings as he snapped off stomach crunches by the abs-rippling dozen, that whole ancient Egyptian take on Oakland being a land of rebirth for the Black Man because of Pullman porters—all that while, sitting there on that skanky old sofa, Titus had seemed for the first time to relax. His angles softened, and his cords went slack. The things he said sounded sincere, unbracketed with an ironic formulation, a celebrity impression, or a parody of a gang-banging TV hood rat. His string had been jerked taut again, and Julie could not tell if it was Titus or some imaginary street Negro who said, “Man, fuck you.”

“We having ourselves a visit,” Luther said. “My grandson and me. And my man Julius. Ain’t that right, boys?”

“Yes, sir.”

My man. Julie reveled in the designation. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Something wrong with that?” Luther wanted to know. “You got an objection?”

“Oh, huh, suddenly he’s your grandson.”

“Not sudden. Been, what, how old are you, boy?”

“Fourteen.”

“Been fourteen years.”

“Fourteen years of you not knowing or giving a shit.”

“You should talk.”

“Ho, snap,” Titus said, as if he had enjoyed the retort, even though Julie could not imagine what there was to enjoy in the idea that for the fourteen years of your life, your father had cared as little about you as your grandfather. But Julie had observed that, like other black kids he knew, Titus seemed able to find humor in things that only would have made Julie feel sad.

“How’d you find us?” Julie asked Archy.

“A customer, owns the cab company. Mr. Mirchandani. You gave the driver your card?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Mr. M. recognized your name, he called my cell.”

“Mr. M. is nice,” Julie said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Archy said. “Okay, come on, you been rescued, now we got to go.”

Julie started to walk toward Archy, more than ready to go home, but when he turned to look back at Titus, he saw that they were going to be standing around having generational difficulties for a while longer.

“Come on! I got to go to Costco, meet up with my marching band. You boys get your asses in the damn car.”

“Go on,” Titus said. Then, softening it, “Yo, Julie, you go on home.”