Telegraph Avenue

“So, what? You going to just give us the records?”

“Now, how can I do that? These are Mr. Jones’s records. They are not mine to give. You know that. But maybe the estate could advance them to you all on consignment. And you all could pay the estate back at some later date. Once you done selling them in France and Japan.”

“Huh,” Archy said. “Well, thank you, Garnet.”

“It must be the funeral has me feeling sentimental.”

“You’re a good man.”

“You put that around, I will have to deny it.”

“Same with what I said about Nat being what I said, to me. Do not tell anybody. Least of all Nat. It’d go right to his head.”

“Maybe after he earn a few more merit badges, we let him in the club.”

“All right.”

“Meantime, you need to figure out what you want to do about yourself, Archy Stallings. You need to make up your mind.”

“Common refrain,” Archy said.

When they went back upstairs, they passed Mr. Jones’s living room, which had a denuded air but with that fussy feel, crewel and fake fruit, as if it had been decorated by ladies of a former age, maybe by the Portuguese lady herself. In the center of the room, two steel suit racks waited side by side, hung thick with the dead man’s leisure suits. The collective palette ran to bold, even heedless, in the seventies manner, or to muted potting-clay tones, something a touch Soviet or even Maoist in the olive tans and rose grays. The plaids had left Scotland far behind and struck out for new worlds of gaudiness, including one in red, white, black, and sky blue that always reminded Archy of a place mat at IHOP.

“Look at that,” Archy said. “Look at those things. And I’ve seen him wear them all.”

“Believe it or not there is actually a lively market,” Singletary said. “I looked into it.”

“Maybe I need to get into a new line,” Archy said.

“Here go Airbus.”

The big man met them at the top step, wearing a beautiful midnight-blue tracksuit, his hair razored down to a glaze on his scalp. Singletary’s car, a late-model Toyota Avalon, stood double-parked in the street, flashers going. Kai Fierro, Gwen’s receptionist, got out of the passenger side. She wore her hair greased back a la Fabian Forte and carried her sax in a soft gig case. She had on a blue brass-button high school marching-band jacket like they all wore in Bomp and Circumstance, corny yacht-captain hat complete with scrambled eggs on the visor.

“This suppose to be the, uh, leader of that Chinese marching band,” Airbus said as though humoring the ranting of a nutjob, so as to keep her calm. “Was outside your store with another white chick named, uh, Jerry something, and two older ladies, trumpet and a sax. She say they made a appointment with Stallings. Want to know what the deal is, what the route is.”

“Hey, Arch,” Kai said. She shook hands with Garnet Singletary, all square and manly, telling him, “I’m Kai.”

Something kind of a turn-on for Archy, funny, in the way she shook Singletary’s hand. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

“It’s an honor,” Kai said. “Cochise Jones, that’s a name that, well, a lot of us in the band, it means something to us.”

“You know he was born in New Orleans,” Archy said. “That’s why he loved the whole funeral-band thing. Always said Chinese people was the only ones around here really knew how to do a proper funeral.”

“Tell you what, though, those guys over in the city, it’s not like New Orleans. They don’t really swing,” Kai said. “Stuff we rehearsed for today, Archy, I mean, it’s all that straight-ahead military funeral stuff. Is that okay? A lot of hymns, ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ and that type of deal.”

“Okay,” said Airbus, big man looking positively offended, “‘Onward Christian Soldiers,’ now, how is that Chinese?”

“But we practiced a lot, you know. And plus, I have to say we put together a pretty swinging arrangement of ‘Redbonin’ ’ that we’d like to do.”

“That sounds just fine,” Archy said, but he was frowning as he took in Kai’s tacky little tenth-grade band jacket. “Now, let me ask you this. What size you wear?”

Softly, under the sound of traffic from Telegraph and the idling of Singletary’s car, almost beneath the threshold of audibility, a bass note sounded and then went up a step. To the south, down over West Oakland, a black zeppelin sniffed at the sky with its pointed snout.

“A’s playing Tampa today,” Archy said. “Everybody’s going to look up, see that, get all excited. Talking about, ‘There go the Dogpile blimp!’”

“I was in the Dogpile down in L.A.,” Kai said. “It was awesome.”

“You’re killing me,” Archy said.

God said, “What the fuck is this shit?”

In the cabin of the Minnie Riperton, Walter Bankwell did not bother to try to look at ease. He did not enjoy the experience of flying in the dirigible, too nervous to have a drink, get loose. And he did not like it when everybody else got loose on board the Riperton, either, though the primary, express purpose of the airship (apart from its function as an irresistible eye magnet) turned out to be corporate entertainment of high-rolling clients, actors and singers and rappers, media folk, athletic shoe barons, that bunch of inner-city librarians won some kind of contest or something, got up there in the sky with G Bad and his posse and went completely out of control.

Walter was not afraid of heights per se; it was the gasbag that worried him. He understood perfectly that there was a difference between helium and hydrogen, but inert and gigantic as it might be, there was something fragile, insufficient, about the Riperton; its name, with its hint of tearing fabric, didn’t help matters. Zeppelins had had their chance, and they had failed. The world had moved on, like with eight-track tapes. Though an eight-track, sure, it might gum up, eat its own innards, one of the little plastic wheels might crumble away to dust. But it was never going to blow your ass up.

Walter felt ill at ease; and surely the truth was that he was not meant to feel at ease, even if he had been willing to drink and get loose. That, and not public or client relations, was the true point of owning a zeppelin; it affirmed the godhood of Gibson Goode, living in his heavenly mansion. Today Walter had been summoned to the throne in the sky to learn of His displeasure.

God picked up the Oakland Tribune that lay on the little plastic hump of a coffee table. “You saw this?” he said.

Headlines, thought Walter bitterly. “‘VINTAGE RECORD STORE OWNER TURNS IT UP TO 78 IN BATTLE AGAINST NATIONAL CHAIN,’” he read. “Yeah, I saw it. Man comes off sounding like a dick. Turn it up to seventy-eight all the time, you end up sounding like Donald Duck.”

“That is a valid comparison,” Gibson Goode said. “In those kind of environments, I don’t know why, sports cards, rare magazines, autographs, the dicks tend to, like, attract a following. But that ain’t even what I’m worried about,” Goode said. “Man, I could give a fuck about that little squirrel-nut-zipper white boy trying to rile up twenty- seven lactose-intolerant white people.”

“All right. Then what are you worried about?”

“I’m worried about you.”

A large white envelope, a mailer with green hash marks around the edge, had been exposed when Goode lifted up the newspaper. The man had at hand all the materials he needed for his presentation, including the bodyguard, Taku, sitting in the dining nook, seriously compromising the vehicle’s vertical lift. Carrying a gun on board an airship, accidental discharge might happen anytime.

“This came to my office in Fox Hills,” Goode said. “Looking like it was sent by a nutball.”

It was a color photograph printed on plain paper, the colors at once sickly and vivid, a starfish thing, purple- blue twisted against a moire of pale blue-green. A scan, on second thought: a 3-D object laid on the glass and photocopied, dark against the infinite, blank, pale blue-green dazzle of whatever you were taking a picture of when you left the cover open on a Xerox machine. The unscannable world.

“Looks like a glove,” Walter said.

“Letter that came with it says it’s a glove.”