Telegraph Avenue (18 page)

“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody died. The baby, the mom’s fine.”

“You’re fine, too?”

She nodded. He laid a hand on her belly, and as always, the contact stirred him sexually. Something fructuous about the swell of her, asking to be opened.

“The baby?”

She stopped crying abruptly, with a sputtering finality, like the last frame of film running out on a reel. “The baby is fine.”

“Aw, then,” he said, fighting down the hard-on, even more inappropriately timed than usual, that had begun to unfurl in his boxers.

“No, Archy, listen, I can’t—I’m not—Oh, Archy, I messed up so-ho-ho
bad
.”

She sank to the ground, and Archy sank with her, the Man of Steel dragged along by the plummeting train. His arms ached, his knees trembled. Gwen seemed by the second to gain pounds and babies and fluids in her amnion.

“Come on inside. Yeah. Stand up. It’s okay.”

He hoisted her and she stood up, her legs going back about their business, but that was all she could seem to manage. She laid her head against his chest and rested. He was thinking,
I can stay here like this all night until my arms break off and fall on the ground in a million pieces
, failing to notice at first how intently Gwen was pressing her face against the front of his shirt, pressing it right up to the skin at his collar, now the hollow of his throat, taking deep inquisitorial breaths.

“Why do you smell like candles?” she said.

She drew back, watching him. She pulled a wad of paper napkins from the pocket of her bloodstained shirt and blew her nose.

“Long story,” he said, “Now tell me what happened.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. I lost my temper. Now we’re going to have our privileges revoked at Chimes, and Aviva’s pissed off at me, and we’ll probably have to close down our practice, and . . . and . . .”

Titus Joyner, riding his brakeless bicycle, rounded the corner by the Island of Lost Toys, the surface of his bare chest lustrous as motor oil. Wearing his T-shirt with the neck hole encircling his head and the rest hanging down behind like a burnoose. Archy’s heart tipped and fell from its shelf. He had persuaded Nat and the boys to go no farther for now, to say nothing to Aviva or anyone else, least of all Gwen. He did not deny or even seriously question the boy’s claim on his paternity. He remembered having heard about Jamila getting pregnant with a child he half assumed to be his, a half assumption that did not prompt him to protest or take any action at all when she went off to Arkansas or wherever to have it. Whenever he heard one of the popular songs of the era, which had provided a soundtrack, as it were, to the blind flailing of his spermatozoa through the inner darkness of Jamila Joyner, he might spare a nano-momentary thought for that child. But until this afternoon Titus had remained an eternal fat, stolid toddler dressed in the world’s tiniest tuxedo, as in the one photo of him that Archy had seen, years ago, sent by the Texas grandmother along with news of Jamila’s death in a car crash. No other comment, no request for the check—in the amount of $375.00—that Archy had provided, uniquely, in return for the photo and the tragic news. He had kept his distance with the boy in the store today, but he was careful not to be cold or unfriendly. The embrace they had exchanged was perfunctory and all but imperceptible to Archy behind the turmoil of his emotions. Now the boy pedaled past, eyes forward, expression blank, looking at neither Archy nor Gwen, neither left nor right, wearing his T-shirt do-rag. He was, like Gibson Goode and the impending fat, stolid toddler in Gwen’s belly, going to ruin everything.

“Who’s that?” Gwen said, watching Archy intently as he watched the kid ride past. There must have been some kind of slackening of Archy’s jaw or widening of his eyes. “Archy, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Archy. At the last possible instant the kid folded. His eyes slid toward Archy, flicked at him before returning front. “I’m— Nothing. No.”

He watched the kid ride off, then turned to face the ruination of his wife, trying to think what he could do. “Wait here,” he said. He walked over to the El Camino in the driveway and opened its passenger door, then slid out the enormous pink aircraft carrier of the cake box from Neldam’s.

“What,” Gwen said, taking a deep shuddering breath, her face wary but brightening visibly, at least to Archy’s trained eye. “In God’s name. Is that.”

“Dream of Cream,” Archy said.

II

The Church of Vinyl

C
an’t play a Hammond through no apology,” said Mr. Randall “Cochise” Jones. “ ’Less you got some new type a patch cord I don’t know about.”

Making it a joke, wanting to hide his irritation. Up all night, spinning five thoughts in his head:
Gig tomorrow. Brown and gold plaid. Bird need his arthritis drops. Gas up the van. Get the Leslie.
Gig, plaid, bird, van, Leslie; needle in a locked groove endlessly circling the spindle of his mind. Mr. Jones felt ashamed of that scanty midnight track list. When he was a younger man, his insomnia used to play it all. Sex, race, law, politics, Bach, Marx, Gurdjieff. All kinds of wild and lawless thinking, free-format, heavy, deep, and wide. Now, shit. Fit it all onto a pissant five-track EP going around and around.

“Said, be here Saturday,” Mr. Jones said.

“I know I did.”

“Black man my age, that could be asking a lot.”

“But here you are,” Archy said.

“Here I am.”

Here he was, sixty-six and still, in fact, lean and strong. The brown and gold plaid giving off that good casino-lobby smell of leisure suit fresh from the cleaners. Bird on his shoulder freely dosed with dandelion tablets mashed into a dish of Quaker grits. Van gassed up to the tune of fifty dollars, backed into the boy’s driveway. It was a white ’83 Econoline, odometer rolled over twice, napped with gray dust. Sitting there, rear doors open, empty as a promise. Boy had told him last week he was finished with the job.

“Mr. Jones, damn, I’m sorry, what else can I say?” Archy said. “It’s been a lot going on.”

“Told me it was finished.”

“Yeah, it pretty much was, but then, huh, turned out your treble driver went bad. I had to go all the way to this dude up in Suisun, pick up another one.”

Archy dialed the padlock on the garage door, unhooked the clasp. Stooped to grab hold of the door handle. Nine o’clock in the morning, boy in his pajamas. Slept in some kind of kung fu getup, satiny red with
BRUCE LEE INSTITUTE
stitched in white silk across the back.

“It really is almost done. Two, three hours, tops. Definitely for sure in time for the gig. When they expecting us?”

“You don’t know that, how you know you be ready in time?”

Archy shot a look at the bird, a roll of the eyes to say,
Can you believe this man, waking me up at 8:57 in the goddamn morning to bust my balls with feats of logic?
Archy Stallings to this day the only person besides Fernanda ever tried to engage the bird in conversation about Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones remembered the way Fernanda used to do it, how she would slam a bottle of pills down on the kitchen table, maybe, turn to the bird on its perch by the window, say something like
You want to make sure he takes his medication, Fifty-Eight. Day he dies, I’m selling you to KFC.

“Nah, but seriously, Mr. Jones. I just need to put it back together, then you ready to go.”

“Young man,” Mr. Jones said, “I need to play it
before
the gig. See it works, how it sounds.”

The garage door swung upward on its hinges with a ringing of springs. The bird, a pound of warmth and steady respiration on Mr. Jones’s shoulder, greeted the Leslie speaker by reproducing the whir of its treble rotor when it powered up. But the Leslie, gutted, said nothing. Its cabinet was even emptier than the van, which at least had some furniture blankets piled into it, a tangle of rope and bungee cords, the dollies. All of the Leslie’s motors, wheels, drivers, rotating horns, and drum, its amplifier like a Kremlin of vacuum tubes, lay ranked in an orderly grid across the workbench at the back of the garage. Mr. Jones could see that everything had been cleaned and oiled and looked correct.

That gravitation toward correctness was something Mr. Jones had always liked about Archy Stallings. Even when Archy was a boy of five or six, kept his fingernails clean and square, never an escaped shirttail. Wrapped his schoolbooks in cut-up grocery bags. When he got older, fifteen, sixteen, boy started working those old-school hipster suits, the hat and a tie, styling himself somewhere between Malcolm and Mingus. Always reading some Penguin paperback, translated from the Latin, Greek; penguin the most correct of all birds, made even the fastidious Fifty-Eight look like a feather duster.

“I’ve been distracted,” Archy said. “And I dropped the ball. Between this thing with Dogpile, you know? And some other things . . .”

“You got to maintain focus,” Mr. Jones said, though the sound of his words made him wince. He recalled with perfect clarity the irrelevance of old men’s maxims to him when he was young. Rain against an umbrella, a young man all but sworn to the task of keeping dry. Archy was not so young anymore, and Mr. Jones had been raining down the pointless counsel on him for a good long time. No more able to restrain himself than a heavy-bellied cloud. “You made a commitment.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Archy said, shaking out his umbrella. “No doubt. Tell you what. You don’t have somewhere you need to be, I can put the whole thing together right now. That work for you? Take me, like, seriously, an hour. Then we can go over to your place, plug the Hammond into it, test out the whole rig. Thing needs adjustments, I make them right there. Then I help you load everything up into the van.” He straightened, tightened the string of his kung fu robe. “And you’re one. Ready for tonight. Okay? Sound like a plan?”

Using the placating tone he took with Mr. Jones, understanding like no one living, apart from one feathered savant, that Cochise Jones was in secret an angry man, prone to impatience, outrage, injury of the feelings. In the liner notes of
Redbonin’
, Leonard Feather called him “the unflappable Mr. Jones,” and at the time, in the chaotic midst of the seventies, that was the rap on Cochise, laid-back and taciturn like some movie Indian, Jeff Chandler in
Broken Arrow
. Nowadays people took him for this harmless, smiling, quiet old parrot-loving gentleman who, from time to time, at the keyboards of a Hammond, adopted the surprising identity of a soul-jazz Zorro, fingertips fencing with the drawbars and keys. Mr. Jones felt as trapped inside that nice old gentleman, smiling, chuckling, as he had inside the wooden-Indian cool of his youth.

“Day I need help moving that thing,” Mr. Jones said, “is the day I give it up for good.”

The Hammond B-3 was diesel-heavy, coffin-awkward, clock-fragile. To gig with one, a man needed to be strong-limbed or willing to impose on his friends. From the day in 1971 when he bought it off Rudy Van Gelder, Mr. Jones had always gone with the former course.

“Find me a chair, then,” he said. “And maybe someplace I can put this damn bird.”

Archy went into the house, came back with two mugs of black coffee, a computer chair, and a broomstick that he rigged with a C-clamp for Fifty-Eight to perch on. He spread one of the furniture blankets from the back of the van on the floor of the garage. Turned out to be Count Basie’s birthday: KCSM was playing the Lambert, Hendricks & Ross version of “Li’l Darlin,” the Count himself taking a rare spin at the keys of a B-3, holding on to the mournful churchliness that the instrument had carried over coming, right around that time, into jazz.

Mr. Jones got out his pipe and his pouch of tobacco and settled in to observe the boy work. He found it satisfying to watch Archy’s meaty Jazzmaster fingers take up one by one the Leslie’s unlikely components, items could have been scrounged from a kitchen drawer, a toy box, and a U-boat, then oblige them, one by one, to cohabit inside the cabinet. His pipe, an angular modernist briar, a gift from Archie Shepp, seemed to draw particularly well today. Alongside the driveway, bees lazed among the honeysuckle bells, and a hummingbird sounded its mysterious ping. Fifty-Eight rummaged idly with its black bill in its dappled breast. The Leslie would be fixed, and they would play their gig tonight up in the Berkeley hills. Everything was manifestly all right. And yet something continued to rankle at Mr. Jones, like a sour finger of acid in the windpipe, a failure that loomed ahead of or lay behind both Archy and himself.

“What ‘other things’?” Mr. Jones said.

Fifty-Eight pinged like a hummingbird.

“Huh?” Archy had the treble assembly mounted in the uppermost of the cabinet’s three stories, belted to the AC motor. He crouched, peering in, listening to the well-oiled silence as the disk with the two horns, the real horn and its dummy brother, whirled on the bearing tube. Blades of a propeller on a cartoon beanie. “What other things
what
?”

“You distracted by.”

Archy switched off the power, and the treble rotor came to rest with an audible sigh. He swung around to face Mr. Jones, laborious and purposeful as a bus turning a tight corner. Rocked back on his haunches, contemplating. Breathing through his nose. Making up his mind whether or not he wanted to start in on it.

“Turns out I got a son,” he said. “Fourteen years old. Showed up at the store yesterday out of the motherfucking blue. Turns out he’s been living right here in Oakland since June.”

Enough time went by for Archy to fairly conclude that Mr. Jones might have nothing to say. Even though Mr. Jones had suspected, even hoped, that Titus might be the “distraction,” the word “son” had caught him off-guard, which in turn left him nonplussed on a deeper level, irritated that the word should still, after all these years, reverberate. At one time you could drop it like a tray of dishes on a tile floor, cut off every conversation taking place inside of Mr. Jones. Now it played only with a soft tremolo of regret, more or less like any other regret that might be audible to the heart of a man of sixty-six. Mr. Jones sat there, confounded by grief, turning Archy’s information this way and that, a paperweight, something small and heavy cut with a lot of facets. Wanting to say something to this fine and talented young man, something lasting and useful about sons, loss, and regrets. The longer the silence stretched between them, the more irritated Mr. Jones became. Archy swung back to the Leslie. Unplugged it, picked up the bass rotor, and slid it into place, tightened the mounting nuts.

“You know your wife how long?” Mr. Jones said.

“Ten years.”

“Uh-huh.”

The pipe was dead, and Mr. Jones passed it to the bird. The bird nipped onto the pipe stem with a click of its beak, then flew off the perch and into the morning. Knock-knocking it against the sidewalk. Probably dropping its mess while it was out there, bird better housebroken than a child of five. A few seconds later, the bird came flustering back to light on Mr. Jones’s shoulder. Passed back the pipe with its freshly emptied bowl. Fifty-Eight had come equipped with that trick by some owner before Mr. Jones, before Marcus Stubbs, who had lost the bird to Mr. Jones in a poker game and who did not smoke a pipe and who furthermore could not have trained a shark to favor steak. Mr. Jones took the pipe, and the bird hopped back up onto the makeshift perch.

“I didn’t tell my wife yet, by the way,” Archy said. “Case you were wondering.”

“You didn’t know you had a son before now?”

“I knew, but I mean, we never had, like, contact. Boy was off in Texas somewheres, uh, Tyler, I think it is.”

“I know it.” Gigging at some corrugated-shack crossroads bar and grill, the night dense and humid and haunted by a smell of roses. Idris Muhammad on the drums back when he was a kid named Leo Morris. Going on half a century ago.

“Boy had his granny, the mom’s mom, living there,” Archy said. “The old lady sent me a picture one time.”

“Uh-huh.”

Mr. Jones poked another hank of his favorite perique into the bowl of his pipe, tamped it down with a finger.

“Nobody ever asked me to be a daddy to the boy,” Archy said. “And I didn’t . . . you know. Volunteer.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yesterday, boy shows up in my store, and I still don’t really understand why, but. He’s with Julie, you know.”

“Julie?

“Julie Jaffe.”

“I didn’t know that boy had any friends.”

“Julie got a full-on crush on the motherfucker.”

“Oh,” Mr. Jones said. “So he’s like that?”

“I do believe that he is,” Archy said.

Nothing in that to disturb Mr. Jones. When it came to lifestyles and behaviors, Mr. Jones played it strictly live and let live. Gays, Wiccans, people who wanted to punch a metal grommet in their earflaps. But somehow it made Mr. Jones sad, without surprising him, to learn that Julie Jaffe had come out a homosexual. That felt to him like something too complicated, too heavy, for a boy so young to lay on himself. He did not disapprove, but he could not see any reward in it. “Boy that age,” he said, shaking his head. “Smart, too.”

The bird beeped like Mr. Jones’s microwave, four times. Popcorn, popped. Then, following its own inscrutable logic, it began to articulate Groove Holmes’s version of the chorus to “American Pie.” A ghostly rotor whirring in its throat.

“Said they met up at some film class,” Archy said, setting the woofer drum into place in the lower story of the Leslie. “Over at the Southside Senior Center.”

“Is that right?” Mr. Jones said, staring at the parrot as if to warn it to hold his tongue about that evening in June.

“It’s a Quentin Tarantino class. I don’t know, I guess they’re studying
Kill Bill
or some shit, watching a bunch of kung fu movies, B movies. Surprised you didn’t sign up for it, loving that
Pulp Fiction
like you do.”

“Only I did sign up for it,” said Mr. Jones. “Sounds like you got to be talking about my boy Titus. No shit, that’s your son?”

Archy raised up slow and careful. Came around on Mr. Jones a little at a time, like he expected to find himself looking down the barrel of a gun. “You know him?”

Whenever Mr. Jones, again in the characteristic style of useless old men, wished to contemplate the brokenness of the world, or at least that part of the world bounded by the Grove-Shafter Freeway and Telegraph Avenue on Forty-second Street, he had only to look across and up two doors to the home of his neighbor Mrs. Wiggins. The woman already seemed old when he and Francesca first moved in with Francesca’s mother back in 1967. But Mrs. Wiggins was strong then, furious and churchgoing, pleased to be known for and to advertise her own iron rule over the tribes of loose children who flowed like migrants through her door—the late Jamila Joyner among them—taking what she could pay them in love and beatdowns, in clean clothes, food on the table. Years, decades, Mrs. Wiggins went on and on, like one of those Japanese soldiers who kept fighting in the Solomon Islands or wherever, nobody ever showing up to reinforce her, tell the poor woman to surrender. But time, crime, and misery in all its many morphologies had at last ground old Mrs. Wiggins down. Though she lived still, she was a gibbering ghost of herself. You had to pity any child who found himself consigned by the high court of bad luck to her care. When Mr. Jones was growing up in Oklahoma City, he had been taken to a carnival whose sideshow featured a man purported to be John C. Frémont and a hundred and twenty-odd years old. Bone hands, a mat of hair, and a pair of filmy eyes peering out from a heap of blankets, shivering. All around the staring thing, in the shadowed tent, stirred the freaks and bodily horrors, sly, embittered, and cavorting. That was how Mr. Jones thought of old Mrs. Wiggins now, in that little house across the street.