Look at this. Here the boys come out of the bathroom, Alfalfa and Stymie. The only thing missing, the little eye-patch pit bull. Both of them with their eyes wide, boy detectives, the black one saying nothing, the Jaffe kid all,
“You were eavesdropping,” said Chan Flowers. “That is wrong, morally and ethically. Every civilized people from the dawn of time has recognized that fact.”
“We didn’t mean to.” Julie, his name was, a girl’s name for a girlish boy. “We’re sorry.”
Flowers said the one thing there was to say to an eavesdropper. “What do you think you heard?”
Julie said they had not really heard anything, just that Flowers was trying to find Luther Stallings to pay him back the money he owed Luther. Also that, while they had been sworn to secrecy, they would be willing to act as messengers.
“Messengers? What do you mean, messengers? Why do I need a messenger? Can’t you just tell me where he is?”
The boys exchanged looks. Flowers was busy managing his impatience, a skill he had acquired without ever quite internalizing, but despite his irritation, he did not fail to detect a spark of genuine friendship between them. It astonished him.
“We heard there was maybe, some kind of”—the boy turned bright red—“uh, beef.”
Flowers asked Titus, didn’t he know how to say anything? “You two remind me of the old man and that parrot,” he said. “Frick and Frack.”
He glanced through the door, across the deserted store to the front door. Feyd and Walter, Bankwell waiting in the hearse. Time to start the parade.
“Fine,” Flowers said. “I tell you what.” He reached into his breast pocket for his checkbook. Then and there, leaning on a stack of records, he wrote out a check in the amount of $25,000.00, payable to Luther Stallings. Signed it with a flourish that he hoped implied magnanimity. “There is no beef,” he said. “That was all a long time ago and far, far away. You can tell him I said that. Bygones be bygones.”
“Forgiveness is an attribute of the brave,” Titus said.
Julie almost smiled, looking pleased and dubious. But Flowers recognized it as one of forty-nine Proverbs, Meditations, and Words of Comfort printed in the last two pages of every funeral program that Flowers & Sons handed out.
“I’m going to have to be careful around you,” he said, handing the check over to Titus. “I can see that. Here. You take that to him. Put it in your wallet. You carry a wallet, don’t you?”
No, of course he did not, just a dense wad of small bills. So Alfalfa put the check into a toy plastic wallet he carried around. Flowers waited until this business had been seen to, concerned about the fate of that check, which he had postdated and would cancel first thing Monday morning.
“That’s no strings attached, right? He doesn’t have to forgive me. It’s his money, he can do what he wants with it. Got that? We good? All right. Now, I know you boys want to ride with the body.”
Having laid aside their frogged jackets this once in favor of the drab and Day-Glo splendors of the Jones Memorial Leisure Suit Library, Bomp and Circumstance cut loose. They played “Nearer My God to Thee.” They played “The Old Rugged Cross.” Their order was good as they led the caravan along Piedmont Avenue to the cemetery gates. Perhaps the brass sounded a touch pallid, like the headlights of the cars in the cortege. Maybe the drumbeat got lost in the heat and hum of the afternoon. But once the casket had been fed by the belts into the ground, they turned from the graveside, the bass trombone taking up the opening groove of “Redbonin,’” which had gone to number thirty-two on the R&B charts in July 1972, and began, as promised, to swing.
V. Brokeland
They were like the kids in that newspaper comic, white nerd, black nerd, pretending at the bus stop on this fine Sunday morning that they were Jedi knights, samurais. Lost so deep in the dream, they didn’t have the sense to be embarrassed.
Shorties rode the bus downtown, got off by Fourteenth Street, walked down to Franklin Street, where there was a donut place, egg roll place, the decor Chinese but the calendar by the telephone printed in some alphabet of snakes. Bank had long since incorporated the house bear claw into his ongoing survey of donut shops from Fremont to Richmond; this one was a notch above the run of the mill. If you were downtown and couldn’t hold out for the Federation or, farther north, the mighty Dream Fluff, Loving Donut would do.
White nerd, black nerd got off the bus and, for once with no swordplay, waited on the empty sidewalk in front of the donut shop as if something real was about to happen. Playing some kind of classic rock, had a flute in it, out of that old green-and-orange shoulder-strap eight-track the white nerd carried everyplace he went. Waiting for another bus to come along, tornado drop a house on them. After a minute or two with no tornado, the black nerd, Titus, said something out of the side of his mouth. Then they waited awhile longer. Titus was built lean, harder than the glasses and that retard bounce in his step led you to expect. Still growing, bound to work out to be tall like his father, maybe not as chesty. In response to whatever Titus said, the other one took out a plastic wallet, yellow and blue. Nestled it close to his chest as if it held magic ducklings, tiny orphan bunnies he was nursing back to health. He tweezed out a bill and passed it to Titus, who went in and returned a minute later holding what appeared to be a dead puppy.
“I see you a bear claw man,” Bankwell said to Titus through the windshield of the hearse, not the brokedown Cadillac or the borrowed Olds 98 but the Flowers & Sons workhorse, a 1984 Crown Vic. No fear or hope of Titus hearing him, kitty-corner away and through the safety glass. “Interesting.”
“You mean ‘nasty,’” said cousin Walter. Prince Walter, the favorite nephew, more like a son to a man who never had any sons of his own. In trouble, now, though. “What you always get.”
“It’s a longitudinal study,” Bank said. “Bear claw is my, what you call, control.”
“Uh,” Walter said, hand to his belly. “Like eating a deep-fried sock.”
“That is why bear claw have to be the control,” Bank explained patiently. “You want to see how much love and affection the chef put into the bear claw. If the bear claw’s good, the standardize donuts be even better.”
“You already had your donut for today,” said Feyd.
“Feyd, shut up.”
“You his conscience now?” little Walter said. “Fucking little Jiminy Cricket motherfucker.”
Walter in a pissy mood, squeezed into the front seat between Bankwell and Feyd. For many of the more reluctant passengers obliged in the past to occupy that spot, the back of the vehicle had come to seem preferable. But Prince Walter only saw his position, no doubt, for the indignity it was. Walter had graduated from the hearses years ago, from handling the dead, washing their horrible feet. Ushering crazy old ladies, keeping an eye on the gang-bang element, enduring the gusts of drama that caught people up, women especially, whenever funerals came along. Then from time to time, like today, paying a visit on behalf of Chan Flowers to somebody who did not want to be found, was not necessarily in the mood for visitors. Walter had left it all behind years ago, moved down to L.A. to work in the record business, come back from time to time showing off pictures of himself with Tupac, Jada Pinkett and Will Smith, Johnny Depp, Snoop Dogg. Finding his way into Gibson Goode’s circle of love. Now here he was, back riding a hearse, not even driving it. Stuck between two cousins he used to know only as likely vessels for the downflow of family beatdowns.
“Feyd keeping track,” Bank said. “Everything I put in my mouth. Sometimes I see him writing that shit down. Boy is spying on my food.”
“Uncle Chan said put him on a diet, one donut a day,” Feyd said. “He said, uh, ‘Big bank,’ you do realize that’s just a figure of speech, right?’”
Walter laughed his scratchy laugh, Ernie from
