Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Kung Fu!” Archy said, coming around the counter to exchange a fist bump and a hug with Walter Bankwell, his best friend from kindergarten all the way through senior year at Oakland Tech, ten pounds heavier and four square inches balder than the last time Archy had seen him. Walter Bankwell was a nephew of Chan Flowers, had put in his time among the cadavers back in the day. Bombing around in the hearses, carrying a pager in case of a corpse, with that smell coming off of him like the water in a vase of old flowers. Somehow the boy managed to slip free of his uncle. Got into the music business, repping for a string of indie hip-hop labels that all folded. Managed a string of modestly gifted rappers, one of whom had almost blown up, sort of, in the greater L.A. area. Meanwhile, constantly in and out of trouble with the police, the IRS, lawyers, record executives, mothers of the young girls his clients liked to fuck. Walter always, lifelong, working that 51/49 smart-to-stupid ratio. A few years back, he had fucked up in a way that invited a severe beatdown from some Long Beach kingpin, put him in the hospital, rehab, physical therapy, Walter’s 49 percent ultimately costing him the sight in one eye. “What’s up , boy?”

“Aw, you know.”

“Working?”

Walter stepped back from Archy, his tracksuit dazzling and sickly green as a glow stick, a long, slow, mocking smile inching up his face at either side.

“What?” Archy said.

“Just like old times, Turtle Stallings, sneaking round the Golden State market. Expect you to have a sixty-four-ounce Orange Crush stuffed down your pants, and two packs of Now and Laters.”

Saying it “ ’nihilators,” the way they used to.

“Huh,” Archy said.

“Checking out the competition, I suppose. Got that Thang moving in, going to have a used-vinyl department twice the size of what y’all got going on here.”

“Nobody knows that. Anyway, it’s apples and oranges.”

“Then when you see me coming out the door, it’s like, ‘Ho, shit.’ Run, Turtle.”

“Fuck you, Walter. Last time I ran from something was in 1991, in Kuwait, and it was a bat with rabies.”

“I’m just playing with you. Check it out.”

Walter’s hand crept into one of the zip pockets of his warm-up jacket and emerged palming a case for business cards, a nice vintage-looking brass one mounted with a big white stone that wanted you to think it was a diamond. Walter took out a card and handed it to Archy. It was printed in black and red ink, with a familiar logo of a paw print in halftone behind the text.

“‘Community Relations,’” Archy read. “‘Dogpile Entertainment Group.’ Since when?”

Walter shrugged.

“Since before your uncle changed his mind… ?” Even before he saw the smirk pushing out Walter’s lower lip, Archy knew it was a stupid question. “Oh, okay,” he said. “It’s like that.”

“Quit pro crow,” Walter said. “As they say. One hand scratching the other.”

“Chan’s little Walter,” Archy said. “I begin to understand.”

A pudgy boy, soft-faced, asthmatic, given to fevers, often hospitalized, supposedly a dead ringer for Chan Flowers’s only brother who had died, Walter was always Chan’s favorite, could always worm his way out of whatever trouble the other nephews got into. All due respect to cynicism itself and to Mr. Mirchandani its prophet, it was hard for Archy to believe that Flowers would sell out Brokeland for a simple payoff. The councilman didn’t give off the smell of that particular kind of corruption. But to reach out a hand to his nephew, the boy not a boy anymore, scuffling around for the past ten years, had only one eye. Maybe that was something Archy could begin to understand.

“‘Community relations,’” Archy said. “Mr. Gibson Goode.”

“Working for G Bad.”

“G Bad know you have a congenital condition in which you were sadly born full of shit?”

“Paid vacation. Corporate retreats in Hawaii. Health benefits.”

Walter trying to sound like it was all due and proper, Archy knowing him too well to miss the almost desperate wonder lighting up his face. Something like that coming along, a hook on a helicopter, snatching him out of the churn and froth and icy water. A paycheck, benefits. Archy imagined coming home with such things in his backpack, how it would be if he could meet Gwen’s reproachful look with news like that, the 50 percent gain in domestic peace that would result if he could move from being shiftless and cheating to merely the latter. A stack of quarters to feed the meter, move the needle out of the red, way over to the right.

“Yeah, that sounds real nice, Walter,” Archy said. “And I wish you the best. Now get the fuck out of here.”

“Turtle—”

“Are you serious? This is my house, you come in here, working for that corporate expansionist retail bullshit—”

“All right, chill, Turtle, damn. I get it. I know how much love you got for this old ex-barbershop, have so many spiderwebs, dust in here, all Roger Corman and shit.” Walter took in the faded sleeves tacked in Plexiglas frames, the old NyQuil-colored clamshell iBook they used for inventory, the bins that Archy and Nat had built themselves, mounting them on rollers so they could be pushed aside to make room for the famous Brokeland rent parties they rarely put on anymore. The arcologies of spiders. “But I tell you what. Dogpile is a one-hundred-percent black-owned enterprise. A hundred percent.”

As if summoned like a genie by this allusion, Nat walked into the store. He was carrying a box of donuts from the Federation next door, and he wore a soul patch of powdered sugar. He took in the spectacle of Walter’s tracksuit and shoes, then seemed to recognize Archy’s old friend with a vague nod.

“Oh, yeah, uh, Nat, this here, you remember Walter Bankwell? Old running buddy of mine? Walter, this is my partner, Nat Jaffe. Walter was, he’s in town on business, and, uh—”

“How you doing?” Nat said. He reached out to shake hands, but Walter raised his arms like a pair of crazy aerials at weird angles to his body. He flattened his hands into a pair of shovel blades and crouched low, sweeping the floor behind him in an arc with the toe of one foot. Some kind of Crane-style move, Archy thought.

Walter straightened up. “Later,” he told Archy without another glance at Nat. His shoes walked out of the store, followed shortly thereafter by Walter, gangster-leaning now a little to the left.

“We used to call him Kung Fu,” Archy explained.

“Just stopping by?”

“That’s all.”

“Old times’ sake.”

“We for sure used to get into some crazy shit, me and him. Right about when I was Julie’s age.”

“You still aren’t Julie’s age,” Nat said. “Julius Jaffe was born older than you are now.”

“I don’t know about that, boss,” Archy said.

Standing across the avenue, right in front of the funeral home, was Speak of the Devil, stepping his skateboard up into his hand, fidgeting alongside a solemn-faced youngster on a bicycle, nobody Archy knew. Casing the joint—Archy felt it deep in the mischief center of his brain—for some kind of metaphysical stickup.

Nat turned to see what Archy was seeing. “You know that other kid?” he asked.

He looked perturbed; recently, Archy gathered, Julie had begun to wobble on his axle. Until now it had been hard for Archy to imagine the boy getting into any kind of trouble that could not be ameliorated by rolling a handful of twenty-sided dice.

“Huh-uh,” he said. “From here, he looks like my little cousin Trevor, but no. That ain’t Trevor.”

“From here, you know who he looks like?”

“What are they doing, just standing there?”