Telegraph Avenue

Flowers might up and straddle a coffin, ride it like a bronco.

“Looks like we have ourselves the hard core here today,” he said, quickly tallying the faces at the counter before settling on Archy, a question in his eyes, something he wanted to know. “Wait out here,” he told his nephews.

The two Flowers nephews stayed out on the sidewalk. Like all of Mr. Flowers’s younger crop of nephews, they seemed not to be wearing their ill-fitting black suits so much as to be squatting inside them until some less embarrassing habitation came along. They had the solemn faces of practical jokers waiting to spring a gag. One of them took out a book of Japanese math puzzles and started working them with a stub of pencil.

“Mr. Jones!” Flowers said, starting in, with that politician resolve, to fill the boxes of this human sudoku.

“Your Honor,” said Cochise Jones.

Flowers reached for Mr. Jones’s octave-and-a-half hand, its nails like chips of piano ivory.

“The honor is indeed mine,” Flowers said, “as always, to bask in the reflected luster of the legacy you represent. Inventor of the musical styling known as Brokeland Creole.” Mr. Jones was also, as far as Archy knew, the first person to use the term Brokeland to describe this neighborhood, the ragged fault where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted. “Hello, Fifty-Eight.”

There was a silence. The bird regarded Flowers.

“Say hello,” Mr. Jones said.

“Say hello, you little jive-ass motherfucker,” Fifty-Eight said.

The voice was that of Cochise Jones, the unmistakable smoker’s croak, but way more irritable than Archy had ever heard Mr. Jones become. Everybody laughed except Chan Flowers. His eyes kept aloof from the smile on his lips.

“Keep it up,” Flowers told Fifty-Eight. “You know I have a deluxe cherrywood pet casket sitting on my stockroom shelf right now, waiting to house your remains.”

This was true; Cochise Jones had made funeral arrangements of Egyptian exactitude for himself and his partner in solitude.

“Brother Singletary.” Flowers pointed a slender finger. “The King of Bling, how are you, sir?”

“Councilman,” Singletary said, looking at Flowers the same way he looked at Fifty-Eight, with a mix of curiosity and distaste, as if touching his tongue to something bitter at the corner of his mouth.

The two of them, Singletary and Flowers, had beefed often and openly over the years, always in a civilized way. Lawsuits, real estate, a long cold war fought against a backdrop of redevelopment money using proxies and attorneys. West Oakland rumor traced the source of beef to the late 1970s, tendering the story that Singletary had married his wife out from under a preexisting condition of Chan Flowers. Rumor further added the dubious yet somehow creditable information that her reason for choosing Singletary over Flowers came down to an ineradicable odor of putrefaction on the undertaker’s hands. “I’m all right, ’less you here to tell me otherwise.”

“Now, you know,” Flowers said, half addressing the room, the voice modulated, genial, but not, in spite of the rhetoric, orotund. Cool and dispassionate, as ready to express disappointment as flattery. “Back in the Bible, only a king could even wear the bling. They did not call it that, of course, did they, Mr. Oberstein? King Solomon, in his book of Ecclesiastes, do you know the vernacular he employed to allude to that which we now style ‘bling’?”

Moby guessed, “Frankincense and myrrh?”

“He called it vanity,” said the King of Bling. “And I got no argument against that.”

“Well, that’s fine, because I did not come in here looking for an argument,” Flowers said. “Mr. S. S. Mirchandani, a latecomer to these shores, but wasting no time.”

“Councilman Flowers.”

“Good for you, sir. And Mr. Oberstein…”

Flowers frowned at the whale attorney, plainly searching for the kind of fitting summary he liked to bestow on people, an epitaph for every headstone.

“‘Keepin it real,’” Nat suggested.

“No doubt,” said Moby, beaming. “True dat.”

“Mr. Jaffe,” Flowers concluded. He pressed his lips very thin.

“Councilman.”

A silence followed, deeper and more awkward than it might have been because Archy had forgotten to turn over the record on the turntable. It was rare, very rare, to see Flowers at a loss for words. Was there guilt on his conscience over changing his mind about the Dogpile deal? Had he come in, this lunchtime, manned up to break the bad news himself? Or was he so caught up in running his own big-time playbook, in setting up his line to defend against the scramble, that he’d forgotten he might run into some resistance at the front counter of Brokeland?

“Archy Stallings,” Flowers said, and Archy, confused, knowing he probably should play it cold and hostile with Chan Flowers but in the lifelong habit of looking up to the man, gave himself up to a dap and a bro hug with the councilman.

“Your dad around?” Flowers said, not quite whispering but nearly so.

Archy drew back, but before he could do anything more than squint and look puzzled, Flowers had his answer and was moving on.

“I seem to remember,” he said, letting go of Archy, “somebody telling me you had left a message for me, Mr. Jaffe. At my office, not very long ago. Thought I would stop in and inquire as to what it might have been regarding.”

“Probably did,” Nat said, still without looking up. At times his protean hum took the form of an earful poured into the councilman’s office answering machine or, when possible, directly into the ear of one of his nephews, assistants, office managers, press secretaries, Nat complaining about this, that, or the other thing, trash pickup, panhandlers, somebody going around doing stickups in broad daylight. “Huh.” He feigned an effort to remember the reason for his most recent call, feigned giving up. “Can’t help you.”

“Huh,” the councilman repeated, and there was another silence. Awkward turtle, Julie Jaffe would have declared if he had been present, making a turtle out of his stacked hands, paddling with his thumbs.

“Now, hold on! Look here!” Flowers noted the baby, who had fallen asleep on the bottle. His eyes went to Archy with unfeigned warmth but flawed mathematics. “Is that the little Stallings?”

Flowers reached out his hand for a standard shake, and Archy took it with a sense of dread, as if this really were his baby and all his impotencies and unfitnesses would stand revealed.

“I know it might seem impossible,” said Flowers, holding on to Archy’s hand, still working the room, “but I remember when you were that size.” Everybody laughed dutifully but sincerely at the idea of Archy’s ever having been so small. “Child looks just like you, too.”

“Oh, no,” Archy said. “No, that is Aisha English’s baby. Rolando. Mr. Singletary’s grandson. My wife and I got like a month to go. Nah, I’m just babysitting.”

“Archy is practicing,” Mr. Mirchandani said.

“It is never too early to start,” Flowers said. Though well provided with nephews and nieces, little shorties all the way up to grown men who had played football with Archy in high school, Flowers was a bachelor and, like Mr. Jones, had no children of his own. “It can definitely sneak up on a man.”

“Maybe I should start practicing being dead,” Nat said too loudly, though whether the excess volume was deliberate or involuntary, Archy could not have said. Before any of them had the chance to fully ponder the import of this remark, Nat added, “Oh, yeah. I do remember why I called, Councilman. It was to ask you to come on by and slit my throat.”

Flowers turned, taken mildly aback. Smiled, shook his head. “Brother Nat, I will never tire of your sparkling repartee,” he said. “What a treat it is.”

“Also, I have that Sun Ra you were looking for,” Nat said, banking the anger, using his smile like a valve to feed it nourishing jets of air. “I don’t know, maybe you want to wait and pick it up at that new Dogpile store of yours. I hear their used-wax department is going to be straight-up bangin.”

“Nat,” Archy said.

“Duly noted,” Nat replied without missing a beat. “Warn me again in twenty seconds, okay?”

“I can certainly understand your distress at the possibility of the level of competition you are going to be