Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

Archy had a choice: Let the significance of these words sink in, or shed it at once without even giving it a try, like a dog encouraged to wear a hat. “Satan,” he said, smiling. “Get thee behind me.”

Behind him there was only a snort from Feyd, or maybe it was Bankwell.

“Up to you, of course. Baby on the way,” Flowers said. “Time you started making some real money. Get yourself that fat package of benefits they’re paying.”

“He could offer me a ride in the Dogpile blimp,” Archy said. “I am not for sale.”

“I love the predictions of a man right before his first child is born,” Flowers said. “They’re like little snowflakes. Right before the sun comes blazing out the clouds and melts those happy dreams away.”

“Living in a dreamland,” Bankwell suggested.

“Indeed,” said Flowers. “But the rent is coming due.”

“Hey, yeah, no, I really want to thank you,” Archy said, getting to his feet. “You really helped me organize my thinking about Brokeland all of a sudden. I appreciate it.”

“Did I?” Flowers’s turn to sound leery, doubting the trend of Archy’s thinking. “How so?”

“You made me realize, we have to do the funeral at the store . Push back all the record bins, how we have them on those wheels, you know? We can fit all kinds of people in there. Just like for the dances we used to put on.” It was not easy, dressed in skanky b-ball shorts and a Captain EO sweatshirt with cutoff sleeves, but Archy dived down deep and hauled up all the dignity he could snap loose from the sea bottom of his soul. “Councilman, you made me realize, thank you, but me and Mr. Jones and Nat Jaffe and our kind of people, we already got a church of our own. You, too, seemed like at one time, up to not too long ago, a member in good standing. And that church is the church of vinyl.”

“The church of vinyl,” Flowers said, looking half persuaded. But he shook his head and made a snuffling sound of amusement or disgust. “Well, well.”

Archy turned and left the office without looking to the Bankwell side or to the Feyd, admiring as he passed between them the echo of his own phraseology as it lingered in his ears.

“You see that fin in the water, now,” Flowers called after him. “You just go on and holler out.”

Wide as the abyss and rumbling like doom, the El Camino rolled into the street of forsaken toys and came to a stop in front of the house. Shudder, cough, soft bang; then the whole afternoon suffused with an embarrassed silence. Late afternoon in late August, the sky limited only by the hills and the imminent wall of night. Palm tree, sycamore trees, soaked in shadow. Slouch-hat bungalows blazing sunshine at their crowns. Archy took it all in with the ardor of a doomed man. Not that he believed himself to be in any danger or was dying in any but the slowest and most conventional of ways. The clarity and sweetness of the evening, the light and the way it made his chest ache, were only the effects of mild panic, panic both moral and practical.

When he got out of the car, the evening laid its cool palm against his weary brow as if feeling for a temperature. He stood on the sidewalk in front of his house. The El Camino’s engine sighed and muttered to itself, settling. A toddler archaeologist searched the sandbox with a red shovel. Probably come up with some ancient bit of toy legend, a Steve Austin head, the head of an Oscar Goldman. Six million ways I use to run it. He would tell Gwen about Titus. After that there would be other things to say to various other people. A number of crucial decisions remained as yet unmade. At least he would have gotten to square one, if no farther.

“Stay right there,” Gwen said, and it turned out that the instruction was meant for young Mr. Titus Joyner, installed on the bottom step of the front porch. Indeed, it might be surmised from his wife’s expression, as she came huffing toward him down the front walk of their house freighted with a big green duffel bag, that rather than stay right where he was, the preferred course for Archy would be to turn around and run for those motherfucking hills.

“I took him to Trader Joe’s,” she said. She dropped the duffel on the ground between them, and it sounded like fifty pounds of property and possessions to Archy’s ear. “There’s canned black bean chili and frozen taquitos. Eggs and bacon and pancake mix and syrup.”

“Okay,” he said. “Whatever you— Okay.” He bent down and picked up the duffel. Fifty pounds. No way could the things that Archy Stallings required to live free and equal and happy in this world weigh anything less than five, six hundred pounds.

“I bought him new socks and underpants.” She shuddered. “And you had better believe that I disposed of the old ones.”

Archy looked at Titus, head in hands, studying his Air Jordans. Archy imagined the new white socks on their plastic bopeeps, the fresh Fruit of the Looms in their crinkling package. It was when he looked at his son and pictured the underpants and socks that he first felt truly ashamed. This boy had no one in the world to ensure, to at least check from time to time, that his underwear was clean. And Archy was so low, of so little account as a man and a father, that Gwen, not even a blood relation, had been obliged to step in like Uncle Sam with a rogue state and intervene. Assume control over the situation.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, man. Titus. Is this how you want it?”

The boy thought it over, taking his time. No flicker of the process of thought was perceptible in his eyes. Then he shrugged.

“Okay, then,” Archy said. He reshouldered the strap of the duffel and looked at Gwen. “Thank you.” He turned away, getting choked up, trying to cover it with a cough, coughing like his El Camino. His broken old car, his broke barbershop full of old broken records, and the broken-down two-tone double town of Brokeland: That was the inventory of his life.

“Excuse me. Where are you going?”

He turned back, understanding that he had failed to understand but not yet fully understanding. Gwen came down the walk, snatched the duffel bag from his shoulder, and staggered off with it to her car. The duffel bag rode shotgun as she backed her Beamer out of the driveway. She rolled down the window on the duffel bag’s side and waited while Archy, checking the neighbors’ windows, finding a face or two, loped over to the car.

“I am going to tell you how to do it,” Gwen said, keeping a tight grip, Archy could see. “It is very simple. This is the only advice I’m ever going to give you, because there is nothing else to really say.”

“Okay,” Archy said. Even though he saw Gwen sitting in her car, getting ready to drive away with her fifty pounds of freedom, he still did not fully understand that she was leaving him. “I’m listening.”

“First I want to make sure you understand. You look confused. Are you confused?”

“Yes, I am a little confused.”

“I have a patient in labor. Amy. I am going to work her birth. And then I am going to sleep someplace else. I will not be returning. With me so far?”

Archy nodded.

“That child over there is your son. Titus. He just barely fits on an AeroBed in the back room. I have been told that he’s capable of speech but haven’t seen too much proof of that so far. Taquitos. Bacon.” She counted them off on her fingers. “You got it?”

“Got it.”

“Okay. Now here is the advice: You have to make them do things they don’t want to do, even when you don’t really care if they do them or not,” she said. “All the rest is, you know.”

It took Archy’s brain a couple of nanofarts longer, contemplating this Möbius twist of advice and the fine rear end of Gwen’s car as it receded, but at last he understood. The packages of underpants, the cans of Trader Joe’s black-bean chili. These were not reproaches thrown at him by an angry woman trying to shame him into paying attention to his child by the sacrifice she was bent on making. They were pieces of information that he was going to need.