Telegraph Avenue

little Julius would stop looking like he was about to be audited by the IRS and just sit there, watching the music like a cat watching ghosts. It was not hard for Archy to hear in his voice that the boy was freaked out.

“Are you going to call the police?” Julie said. “Or should we?”

Archy perched in his underpants on the windowsill. He looked at Kai in the bed, born a girl but not feeling it, maybe 50 percent of the way toward becoming a man. Still carrying all her reproductive organs of origin but unwilling to let Archy make use of them, asking him to please fuck her in the ass, nothing to ease the passage but a handful of spit. Kai was following a recipe, a series of steps: hormones, paperwork, surgery. And then one day she would wake up and be a dude, and in all likelihood, credit where it was due, a fairly dope one at that. Archy wondered if all the mental and emotional side of being a man flowed in with the hormones, like when you were digging in the sand and broke through to water. Maybe if you actively chose to be a man and followed all the prescribed steps and procedures, you would end up with some kind of clear convictions and never find yourself, say, walking out as a weak-ass way of implementing some dumbshit Plan B that you hoped would simply expire before you had to go through with it.

“Stay where you are,” he told Julie. “I’ll see to Luther and Valletta, have your dad come get you.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Okay. Just, yo, don’t tell my mom?”

“Promise you’ll never say ‘yo’ again.”

“I swear.”

Archy sorted out and put on his sour shirt and funeral suit, cupped water at the bathroom sink, tried to ignore the lunar ruin of his hair. Patted the hip pocket of his jacket.

“I took your keys,” Kai said. “Your car is parked by the store.”

“Thank you,” Archy said. Something else from one of the short night’s vivid dreams bobbed at the surface of his memory. “Right.” He rummaged through Kai’s leisure suit and came up with his keys. She had pulled the moving-van blankets up to her chin. Her small brown eyes were watching him. “I have to go.”

“Sounds like it,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“Um, ow?” She sat up, uncovering her wide mouth, those smart-ass lips. “Good luck in Belize.”

“Yeah—what?”

The bobbing memory surfaced. Driving by the house on the Street of Lost Toys in the indefinite time after the lights came on at the Lakeside Lounge. Gwen standing on the front porch in her robe, silent as an idol to be robbed of its forehead ruby. Archy telling her to get out the way, grabbing a suitcase from the hall closet. Shoving all kinds of miscellaneous belongings in there, cans of tuna, probably a bra. Belize!

“Yeah, uh, thanks for getting me out of there in one piece.”

“Oh my God, I’m so fired. Gwen was pissed.”

“Yeah, I’m, uh, I’m sorry.” He glanced around the room one last time, then nodded goodbye, wishing he had a hat to cover the abomination of his hair, all shoved up to the front of his head. “As of now, okay, like two, three hours from now, I’m out of the picture.”

“In Belize.”

“I got all the maps.”

The eyes, the snarky mouth. Disappointed in him. Thinking he was better than that. “Have fun,” she said after a pause.

“Huh,” Archy said. “Not what I thought you were going to say.”

“What did you think I was going to say?”

“‘Man up.’”

“Fuck you.”

He took her yacht-captain hat out of the grocery bag she was using to carry around her discarded band uniform. “Yo, can I borrow this?”

“Keep it,” she said. “It looks stupidly good on you.”

Archy walked down to Telegraph in the L. Ron Hubbard hat, flipping open his phone, thinking about Julie’s question. First thing Aviva was going to say: Call the police. Tell somebody, don’t keep it a secret. Silence equals death. Take back the night. Aviva had been trained by bitter experience, like a lot of women doing the kind of work she did, to go by the book. Same with Gwen, her family packed with cops and lawyers; she would almost always throw in on the blue side of a question. Neither of them understanding that Chan Flowers would be only too happy to have the police in the mix. He was a city councilman, chair of the Public Safety Committee, tight with a lot of OPD captains and brass. When they died, patrolmen, firefighters, Chan Flowers buried them gratis, with somber pomp universally commended. The police would always be there to protect Chan Flowers. Once the man got back whatever Luther had taken from him, it would be full-on Patch me through to McGarrett, motherfucker. After that, you could tell the story of what happened when OPD met the sad old ex– kung fu champ blackmailer, and at the end of that story, in the way of the aptly named criminal justice system, it would probably be the woman, poor lost-tooth Valletta, who might have tried to be a mother to Archy if Luther had been willing to let her, who ended up doing the time.

That was something Aviva could surely understand, but Archy had no time to explain. He was reasonably certain that Chan Flowers would not endanger his position and reputation by doing anything to hurt Luther, have a couple Flowers boys curb-stomp him out behind the mortuary, but then again, within the shroud of power and funereal dignity, something internal to Chan Flowers was still on fire. Maybe the odd exemplary curb-stomp was the exact means men of position and reputation employed to stay that way.

“He around?”

“He is,” Aviva said, a warning in it. “How are you, Archy?”

“Gwen’s there?”

“Right here in my kitchen.”

That was good, in a way; Gwen could sit there saying, Fuck it, I can have a damn cup of coffee if I want to, calling down curses on Archy’s head, finding the strength at long last in the cheerful kitchen of her best friend to do what she ought to have done so long ago, see Archy for the feckless showboat he was. Brewing up the Peet’s in that fancy French cyclotron coffee drip of Nat’s while they handicapped divorce lawyers, Aviva naturally pushing the do-it-yourself model, talking about how you can go on down to that Nolo Press on Parker Street in Berkeley, they have all the forms and books you need. Frigid weather had obtained between the women lately, and something like this was all they needed to thaw things out. Meanwhile, Nat could slip out the door without attracting too much attention, too many questions.

“You hearing all the dumbshit things I got up to last night?”

“Probably not all,” Aviva said. “Enough.”

“So can I get with Nat?”

“What?” Nat said when he came on the line, the sulk laid on thick so one might think it was for show, but Archy knew that sulking was a gift Nat could not control, the lonely gift of Achilles in his tent.

“You have to drive to that Eritrean restaurant on Telegraph, the one down by MacArthur, pick up the boys, they’re waiting for you there. Okay?”

“You can’t be serious.” Deep in that dive helmet of his, down in the Yap Trench with his lead-soled boots. “I’m in my underpants.”

“I know Gwen’s loving that.”

“Eat me.”

“I got to run, Nat. You know the place, we went there that time.”

In a few blocks, Archy came upon his car. Last night’s madman suitcase was still in the truck bed, half hidden under the furniture blanket. Furniture blankets, motif of the day. Symbolizing nomadism, impermanence, the need to coat yourself against the damage of transit. He pulled back the blanket and looked at the old blue plastic Samsonite, blinking away a few more jump-cut memories from last night, at the house, him doing all the yelling, Gwen not saying a word, eyes measuring him, seeing him for what he was, loud and drunk and fixing to leave. Three thousand seven hundred and fourteen dollars in the Brokeland Records account at Wells Fargo. Draw it out. Get in the car, start driving, 680 to the 5 to I-10, turn south at Tucson into Mexico. Chihuahua, Zacatecas, Veracruz. Hit Belize in