“Zatoichi!” Feyd said. “That’s good, I could use me a massage.”
Feyd looked down at Titus, saw what had become of the bear claw, wrinkled up his face.
“Look at you, bitch,” he said to Titus, who rose dripping to his feet, boy full of hateful thoughts he sent out his eyeballs toward Bankwell Flowers III. “What the fuck you do to yourself?”
“It’s okay. Okay, come on. Leave them alone.”
Bankwell turned to see Walter bringing up the rear of a short procession, the apex of a loose triangle whose remaining points were Valletta Moore and Luther Stallings with their hands up. Walter held the Beretta high and crooked, one-handed, in that movie style Uncle Chan abhorred.
“You found me,” Luther Stallings said, the old-school kung fu movie star, wiry and fit in a kimono, parachute shorts, pair of black cloth Bruce Lee slippers. Gray in his hair and chest fur, more lines on his face than Uncle Chan. “Put up the thumpers. Let me get my clothes on. Go on home, boys. I’ll be fine.”
Bank had seen, not recently, a movie or two with Luther Stallings in the lead. This was pretty much what he remembered: to the point, monosyllables, the lazy smile. So either this was acting, too, or there was no acting involved.
“Go ahead, Julie, Titus,” said Valletta Moore. “Boys, go on. You can go.”
“Fuck they can,” Bank said.
“It’s all right,” Walter said. “We got no room for them, anyway.”
While Bank was distracted by how stupid Prince Walter could be sometimes, Titus woke up. He grabbed hold of Julie’s shirt and dragged him down the stairs, four feet in sneakers chiming on down to the parking lot, sneakers against the blacktop.
“Dammit, Walter!” Bank said.
Now that he was thinking again instead of just doing, he made a futile show of going to the railing, weighing whether it made sense to take a shot at the runners. But it was only a show, and everyone knew it.
“It’s a hearse, you dumb-ass!” Bank said. “We could of fit Nell Carter in that thing, in a extra-large box.”
“Whatever,” Walter said.
“Kung
“Yo, what up, Mr. Stallings. How you been?”
Sheepish, Prince Walter underwent a headlock at the mercy of the old movie star. Valletta, though; the lady was not prepared to join in the warm and heartfelt reunion just yet.
“Walter Bankwell, Lord have mercy,” she said. “How did it ever come to this?” She lifted up her sunglasses to beam her most full-strength shaming rays at Walter. “Mixed up in this kind of fool behavior.”
“What I been saying to myself all day,” Prince Walter said. “Word for motherfucking word.”
In Archy’s last dream of the night, he was a youngster and yet also his present-day self, talking to his mother in an apartment of the 1970s. Mauve was healthy, no shadow hanging over her, and although he was dreaming, a part of Archy’s mind marveled at how much clearer and more present she seemed in this dream then she ever did when he tried, in waking life, to picture her. It was that type of dream—self-conscious, fathomable as you were dreaming it. All the pain and longing that had to do with his mother’s death, the untouchable spot lodged inside him like the black meteorite in the Kaaba, was palpable as he sat with her, making absurd conversation. As he dreamed, he understood that the conversation didn’t make any sense, that the dream was a form of grieving, with the passing of Mr. Jones acting as a trigger, an undercurrent. In the dream, it felt good to grieve. The record playing in the background of the dream apartment was a classic collaboration between Maceo Parker and Curtis Mayfield, the soundtrack from a well-known blaxploitation movie called
Then the song playing in the background of the dream apartment, with its silver wallpaper, rolled slowly over into “Trespasser” by Bad Medicine. Archy woke up on the floor of the dead man’s house, stacked into a pile of moving-van blankets. He heard his phone ringing and knew that his mother was dead, and that
“Your phone,” said Kai. Supposed to be a lesbian, with that Bowser haircut and how she filled out the shoulders of her borrowed leisure suit, but at five in the morning—after they sneaked in through a basement window in the backyard of Mr. Jones’s house to let Kai, who turned out to collect gospel and Southern church music, hold a private listening party with Mr. Jones’s small but interesting selection of rare Savoy and Checker sides—the picture had turned out to be more complicated than that. “Yo, your
“What’s wrong?” Archy said into the phone.
“This is Julie.”
“Yeah, I get that. What’s wrong?”
“Okay, first of all, I know we totally messed up.”
“That’s first of all?”
Archy hauled himself with a wobble to his feet, hangover gumming up his inner gyroscope, and went to the dormer in the parlor. The sun fell in bars through the iron on the windows, and he slotted his eyes into a line of cool shadow and looked out at Forty-second Street. A peanut-butter-colored cat skulked, hunting, along a bed of nasturtium and blown newspaper. It was Sunday morning, August 29, 2004. The funeral was past. Today was the day he was sworn to get serious about his life.
“This has to do with Luther,” he said.
“How did you know?”
“Man, I thought I told you two, keep away from him.”
“Archy, they got him. They went into his room and they carried out his, you know, all his file boxes. And they took him. And then Valletta started to, like, she was kicking them and stuff. Not like some kind of Wing Chun roundhouse kick or something, just straight-up knee in their crotch, biting them and shit. So they had to take her, too.”
“Who?”
“Oh, and I hit this one guy with a
Titus came on, talking on top of Julie in a put-on voice like some old white chemistry teacher from Iowa. “That is a true story,” he said. “I can vouch for that.”
“Julie? Hit
“Those guys from the funeral home. I think the big one is named Bank.”
Archy felt the sense of relief, or at least reassurance, that came with certain kinds of failure. Yesterday Chan Flowers had asked him to choose between his future—responsible dad working for an admirable employer with a good job doing what he loved—and protecting his no-account, pipehead, washed-up, full-of-shit, lying, smiling poor excuse of an absent father. Archy had walked out of the situation, which was a weak-ass way of choosing Plan B, for no good reason at all except some pathetic residual loyalty to the man who had done nothing but squirt some key proteins into his mother’s belly. And because, why not finally admit it, a man like Archy was never likely to go for a plan like Plan A. Come on. He was no better than Luther Stallings, and the theoretical loyalty to his father on display yesterday consisted of nothing more than that. Like so many kinds of masculine loyalty, it was really only a manifestation of cowardice. Now Luther was beyond protection, Archy’s lack of resolve having outlasted both Plans A and B, a proven technique otherwise known as Plan C.
“Where’d they take him?” he said.
“We don’t know. They had the hearse, so… yeah.”
“Okay. Where are you and Titus?”
They were at an Eritrean restaurant, way down Telegraph by MacArthur. They had cash and a phone. They knew how to get the bus back to the Jaffes’ place. Julie said they would definitely be okay, but Titus did get a bloody nose, plus he had vomited on himself, his nose wasn’t bleeding anymore, but it looked gross, and he smelled bad, and also he had a headache.
Archy had known Julie since he was not even two, from a little old man wringing his hands in a bouncy chair hanging in a doorway. Bouncing never did much good, but you could settle the kid right down by putting on the most Out shit you had on tap, the deepest kind of Sun Ra jazz-as-cosmic-background-radiation. Long as it was playing,
