Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Only that Cochise Jones— Oh. Excuse me. Whoa. No, I’m good. Mr. Jones was like a father to me, which I seriously needed. That’s one point. And the other point is, since I’m here doing this eulogy, I have a responsibility to have us, you know, take a look at the life the man led and, like, extract some kind of wisdom out of it. Right? So here goes.

“Seems like, I don’t know. When people start looking at other people, people not like them, one thing they often end up liking about those people is their music.

“There’s sort of a, what, an ideal that I know Nat and me always had in mind for this store. Not, like, anything we ever planned out or talked about. But it’s something like this: on the old Silk Road, you know, between Europe and China. It’s all tribes and deserts, and then you’ve got this long, hard journey, take you a couple of years to get there if you go quick. It’s a hard road, it has bandits, sandstorms. You carrying the light of all the civilizations back and forth, but all around you, the tribes just want to keep up their warring, and killing, and keeping track of what makes them better than everybody else. Like you know how every tribe’s name, when you translate it, turns out to mean ‘the people,’ like nobody else but them is really human ? But you keep on because you are trying to earn a little cheese, right, and you spreading the collective wisdom back and forth. Forging that Creole style. And every so often, every few hundred miles, maybe, you got these oases, right, these caravansaries, where they all get together and chill, hang out, listen to good music, swap wild tales of exaggeration. Nat, man, you know what I’m saying, right? That was kind of our dream. The Brokeland Creole dream.

“Mr. Jones was a mainstay of this caravansary. He was, like, our idol in the corner, the household god. Now he is gone, and we, me and Nat— Whoa. Okay, yes, could I get that tissue, Aviva? Thank you.”

“You can ride with us,” a voice was saying, sounded like the undertaker. “Funeral can’t start without the deceased.”

In reply, only a silence, partial, intensified by the sounds of departure from the front of the store, chairs scraping, people offering rides, vouching for their own or somebody else’s sobriety. Burial-suit thugs from the funeral home handing out maps to the grave: Miss, a map?

Titus zipped his pants. The way to play it, saunter out of the bathroom into the workroom, alone. Kid coming out of the toilet zipping up his Levi’s, so what? He communicated his intentions to Julie by means of Special Ops hand signs: I, turn out light. You, stay. I, go, create diversion. You, count thirty, exit bathroom, slip out the back. Julie nodded: Understood . That turned out not to be the case, because the minute Titus switched off the light, Julie just went and opened the bathroom door. Eased it open, at least a show of stealth, half an inch, an inch.

Then the answer: “I’ll give you five minutes.”

His father. Archy. Tightness in his voice. Fronting. Bored with the undertaker, bored with using boredom as a front. Angry, tired.

Titus and Julie exchanged a look in the darkness: change of plan. The lonely science of eavesdropping, another mad love they shared. Two of Julie’s fingers keeping the door open that one little inch.

“All I need is five seconds ,” the undertaker said. “To say you are the stupidest, most self-defeating negro I have ever seen. And my experience in that category is long and bitter.”

Archy said, “Let me save you the five seconds, then, ’cause I already know that.”

“How about this, then? You have played yourself now.”

“No surprise there, either.”

Archy was leaning against one of the rolling bin tables they had humped into the workroom that morning, his wide ass in those ugly black suit pants pinned against a corner of the Disco section. On the tab of the white section divider behind him were written, intriguingly, the words YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA. Titus briefly imagined the warm, candy-flavored music that might go by that name.

“I hope you were not counting on going to work for Gibson Goode anytime soon. Because as far you are concerned, Gibson Goode has moved on.”

Archy Stallings looked uncomfortable and unhappy, arms crossed, scowling, sharp corner of the record bin poking him in the ass. Maybe he was using the pain to focus himself, keep himself on his guard. Titus was not sure how loaded or sober the man was.

He had made his funeral speech, flowing all over the place, Indians, Vietnam, gumbo, Sly Stallone. At the end of his disquisition on what an undifferentiated mess life was to him, the man had choked up. In that instant, Titus had played a scene in his mind: The pregnant lady got up, put her arms around her baby’s daddy, he put his hand on the giant-size belly, and they decided that in the end, as long as life was going to be an undifferentiated mess, they might as well not fight it anymore. Make a place in the mess for a baby, a baby who would have a mother and a father, one small victory for the good kind of doubt and confusion over the bad. But in reality, when the movie in Titus’s mind came to an end, it turned out to be Julie’s father, Nat, giving Archy the hug of consolation. The box of tissues got passed around.

Then there was some drinking, for sure. Beer, wine, Cokes. People drank it all. They ate up the food, bum-rushed the buffet like freed prisoners, bees on a melting Popsicle. An hour later, it was all gone. A lone can of tonic water floated in a cooler, untouched among the ice cubes for quite some time, and eventually found its way into the company of a bottle of gin that never made a public appearance. The last Saturday afternoon of the summer went about its business, and it got to be time to ride on over to the cemetery, if you were going.

When the food was gone, the undertaker gave out instructions to his nephews and organized the procession to the cemetery, suggesting to some people that they let others do the driving, speaking in a kindly whisper far from the warlock voice he was using on Archy Stallings. Then the lid got lowered for the last time on Cochise Jones, and Titus played a scene in which he persuaded a few trusted confederates to join him in a heist operation to steal the clothes off the dead man before they were lost forever to rot and darkness and oblivion. Trap the hearse between a couple of tractor-trailers at an intersection, pull up in another hearse, switch caskets. Never let that beautiful thing, the Aztec number, go wasted in the ground. By the end of the scene he was cutting in his head, Titus found himself deep into creeping himself out, picturing a piebald cadaver rotting in the stainless leisure suit. Thing was made of space-age materials, no worm was ever going to touch it. Eternal as a Twinkie.

“So, you and he,” the undertaker was saying, “you are calling it quits. Is that what I am to understand?”

“I know you would be happy about that.”

“I would only be partway happy,” the undertaker said. “Which is the same as not happy at all.”

“We close the store, Nat’s bound to drop this whole protest thing. You won’t have to worry about that anymore.”

“Your friend already did his damage to me,” the undertaker said. “Now Rod Abreu has come sniffing around this whole deal, acting to the world like he is trying to eighty-six it. Letting Gibson Goode think he’s an enemy and needs to be kept close, as the saying goes. Needs to be won over . Right now, today, Rod Abreu is sitting at the Coliseum, letting G Bad pick up the tab for the nachos.”

Titus could not see the undertaker’s face, only the steely curl of the pompadour thing at the back of his head. But from the sound of his voice, he must be looking disgusted, contemptuous. It was an easy enough expression to imagine on the undertaker’s face.