Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“I can’t do that,” Luther said.

“Why not? Because you’re going to take all that money he ain’t never going to give you, use it to make a movie you ain’t never going to make?”

Archy might have counted on one hand the number of times in his life when he had left his father with nothing to say. He figured it was the slap on the head, or maybe there was something persuasive in the nakedness of his contempt for Luther’s project. Luther fell back to muttering, shaking his head. Reminding Archy of that wino on his crate the other day outside Neldam’s, clinging to his little sack of rolls.

“Give him the glove,” Archy said, fighting—for his own sake, not for Luther’s—to keep any tone of compassion out of his voice. “And I will pay for your movie.”

Steak through the bars of a shark cage. Luther looked up, wary and hungering. “How?”

“Sell the store. Whatever I get from my half, I give it to you.”

“Now, why would you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Archy said. “It can’t be because I give a fuck what happens to your worthless black ass.”

“Boy,” Luther said, drawing himself up out of the chair, still with a good two inches on Archy though giving up at least twenty-five pounds, “I am grateful for the generous offer, but I am tired of your disrespect. I am going to issue a warning. You speak to me again in that fashion, you going to find yourself in possession of one genuine, old-school beatdown like you haven’t had in thirty years.”

“Man,” Archy said in an unconscious echo of his own son’s words to him the other morning, “ fuck you.”

“Gentlemen,” Flowers said. It was too late.

Archy’s historic decision, taken sometime around 1983, no longer to give a shit about his father, coincided almost precisely with the last time he had attempted to kick Luther’s ass. Like the five or six preceding it, that attempt also failed. Even big and strong and flooded with the manhood that he was then well on his way to attaining, and even with Luther geeked and anorexic, Archy’s bulk and raw anger were no use against his father’s deep-grained skill.

But this was a sneak attack, and Archy exploited the advantage. He hurled himself onto Luther, toppling him over onto the little couch, which in turn tumbled over backward, and the two men fell on the floor. Before Luther could begin to recover, Archy scrambled across him, straddling him, and flipped him over so that Luther’s face was pressed against the low-pile gray carpet. He sat on his father’s ass and pinned his wrists together with one hand while, with the other, he grabbed hold of his hair. Digging in his fingers, he jerked his father’s head back. “Give it to him.”

“Fuck you.”

Archy dug deeper, jerked harder. “Give him the glove, Luther.”

“I can’t. Get off me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I lost it.”

“Lost it? You mean you never did find it? Valletta didn’t have it?”

“She had it. But in the last move we did, I don’t know, it got lost. I can’t find it. I swear. Get the fuck off me.”

“What?”

“I had it,” Luther said, writing his own epitaph without trying. “But I lost it.”

“I would really like to believe that,” Flowers said. “I’m going to need some kind of guarantee. What happens when it turns up again?”

“How about a sworn statement,” Archy said. “An affidavit he writes in his own words that he’s been blackmailing you for years, that he made up the whole story about the glove and the murder, how you didn’t have nothing to do with it.” He gave his father’s head another jerk, for emphasis, really. “You do that, confess that you’ve been blackmailing, Luther? I’ll give you whatever I manage to get from selling the store. Then you get to keep on living this admirable life of yours.”

“That would be acceptable to me,” Flowers said. “But huh, we’re going to need a lawyer for an affidavit like that. I can’t imagine what kind of lawyer. I know mine wouldn’t want to even hear about this. ”

Archy said he thought that Mike Oberstein might be prevailed upon, but first of all, what did Luther have to say about it?

“Had three things on my wish list,” said Luther, “coming out of the program last year. And one of them was not ‘Please let my son slap me upside my head, pull my hair, and sit on top of me, motherfucker must weigh two hundred and forty, two-forty-five.’”

“Yeah,” Archy said. “Oh. Sorry about that.” He unstraddled his father, lurched to his feet. Luther rolled over onto his back and lay there, staring at the cottage-cheese ceiling, at the box that held Terrell Padgett. His eyes brimmed over, but he blinked the tears away, and they were gone.

Archy reached down and held out a hand to Luther. Luther took it. He let Archy pull his weightless wiry armature off the floor. When Archy tried to get his fingers loose, Luther held on to them. His grip was the inveterate iron thing that had punished cinder blocks, pine planks, Chuck Norris. Archy gave up and let his father shake his hand.

“That was number two on the list,” Luther said.

The mom was a kid, two months shy of twenty-one, her baby’s father out of the picture. She worked the line at Chez Panisse and from time to time sold cupcakes out of a taco truck. When Aviva had first met her, she was a strawberry-blond third-grader named Rainbow, the daughter of the facilitator of a women’s-business network Aviva had belonged to at the time. A wordless slip of a girl, moving sideways at the edges of rooms. Now she was dyed to a shade of blackberry brunette, had dropped the second syllable of her name, tattooed maybe 60 percent of her body with a gaudy loteria of half-allegorical objects (a bee, an umbrella, an egg in an eggcup), and, for today at least, taken center stage in her world. In the world; Aviva still felt that way after all these years, after having caught a thousand babies and been afforded every opportunity by routine, patient-borne neurosis, or the health care industry to grow disenchanted, jaded, or bored with the work. A person tended to see herself as a streetlamp on a misty night, at the center of a sphere of radiance, but that was a trick of the light, an illusion of centrality in a general fog. A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.

“I feel like I’m going to shit,” Rain said. She had gotten all the way to eight centimeters within two hours of her first contraction, but the journey to the hospital seemed to have slowed her down. “What if I shit in the bed?”

“I dare you,” said Aviva.

Click of the door latch, inrush of hospital hum. Aviva had her back to the door of the pretty new LDR that Rain had lucked into, blond wood and chrome trim, a suggestion of slim Danish moms giving birth to strapping young socialists. Audrey, Rain’s mother, leaped up from the armchair to drag the curtain around the bed with a rattle of BBs.

“Ms. Jaffe?” It was one of the nurses, a Filipina named Sally, a good nurse, with the same well-trained way Gwen had of being sugar-sweet and kick-ass at the same time. “Your darling husband is here.”

It was Aviva’s turn to leap to her feet. She could not recall Nat ever having shown up at the hospital, unbidden. Maybe to bring her a more comfortable pair of shoes, something to eat. For him to turn up out of the blue had to mean bad news, disaster. As she followed Sally down to the nurses’ station to meet him, she fished her phone from her back pocket, looking for the voice mail she must have missed. No calls from Nat or Julie. No calls from anyone at all.