Michael Chabon - Telegraph Avenue

“Tell me this,” he said, “if you close your store, curl up in a ball like a little pill bug, what are you going to do for a job to support your child?”

Only a second before, Archy had seemed fucked up, puzzled. He had this pudding look to his cheeks. Now it was all concrete and stone.

“I am going to see Mr. Jones on home,” he said. “And we ain’t finished doing that yet. I don’t need to ride with you. I have my own car.”

“Do you have a map to the gravesite? You’re going to need a map.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Mountain View, two hundred and twenty acres. Hundred and fifty thousand people buried there. Five, six funerals a day. You got the Jews in one place, Chinese over there. Black folks sprinkled all through it. Talk about Brokeland Creole. Mountain View Cemetery, that’s the only place you ever actually going to find it. But you need a map. You need guidance .”

“Oh, okay. You’re going all Jedi on me now.”

“Hear me out.”

“Going Morpheus.”

“You don’t deserve it, boy. But I am still willing to help you. We can get this mess straightened out. Luther has something I want. Nothing crazy, illegal, not drugs, guns, stolen goods, none of that. All right? Or yes, the thing was stolen, but it was stolen from me ! It’s mine! I mean, seriously.” His voice broke, raspy almost to the point of a wheeze. “It’s mine, he has it, and I want it back. I have money, Luther’s broke. I figure maybe you’ve heard one or two things about me over the years that might have planted a seed in your imagination. When you are an undertaker and you come from a whole family of undertakers, people are going to hold all kinds of wild beliefs about the way you go about your business. So I want to reassure you. I don’t want to hurt Luther, do not want to mess with him, the Lord knows, Archy, I want nothing to do with that man any more than you do. That old boy wore me out a long time before he got around to wearing you out. I am a respectable businessman, I sit on the city council. I am not a gangster, and I know what people say about me, but it’s lies and rumors and folks letting their imaginations run away with them. One time when I was a young man, I made a mistake. A long time ago, right out of the navy. I made a mistake, but I was lucky, and one way and another, with some help from your father, credit where credit is due, I was able to put it behind me. Stopped running wild and acting a fool all the time. Got serious about life and settled down and did good for myself. Things did not go so well for your father. The whole time I was rising, he was sinking down. For the past ten, twelve years, he’s been coming around here, sometimes sober, most of the time so high or so drug-sick, he could not even really talk. But most of the time he managed to get his palm out, and I always crossed it with some cash for him.”

“He was blackmailing you.”

The undertaker didn’t respond to that. “Everything gets put where it belongs,” he said. “You can still find yourself standing behind the information desk in the Beats Department at the Dogpile store on Telegraph Avenue, dropping science on the youngsters when they stop in to pick up the new Lil’ Bow Wow, getting that employee discount to bring home one of those Baby Mozart DVDs, teach your new child to play the cello while he’s sleeping.”

“And I have to do what?”

“Son, I know you know where he is.”

“I honestly don’t.”

Crouched down in the bathroom with Julie leaning in over him, Titus heard the man lying. At the body shop, it had made him furious to see the contempt his father showed toward his own pops. Now Titus felt sorry for the dude, so twisted up with hate that he could not even let his poor, old kung fu ex-junkie daddy get paid back money he was free and clear owed.

“Have it your way, then,” the undertaker said.

For the first time, you could tell, Archy was thinking. Going back over it all. Making up his mind to do what he was going to do.

“I have no reason to want to enable that man,” he said. “And I have known you all my life, Brother Flowers. But I can’t help feeling like I’m seeing a side of you I never really believed was true.”

“Just conducting business.”

“Nah. You’re an undertaker. A mortician. Burying a dead man, supposed to be more than just business.”

“Well—”

“You never once told me, ‘I’m sorry for your loss. Mr. Jones was a fine man and a sharp dresser,’ or anything of that type.”

“Well, I am sorry,” the undertaker said.

But by that time, man was already on his way out the workroom door, headed for the cemetery and whistling “It’s Too Late.”

Look at this. Here the boys come out of the bathroom, Alfalfa and Stymie. The only thing missing, the little eye-patch pit bull. Both of them with their eyes wide, boy detectives, the black one saying nothing, the Jaffe kid all, We know where he is.

“You were eavesdropping,” said Chan Flowers. “That is wrong, morally and ethically. Every civilized people from the dawn of time has recognized that fact.”

“We didn’t mean to.” Julie, his name was, a girl’s name for a girlish boy. “We’re sorry.”

Flowers said the one thing there was to say to an eavesdropper. “What do you think you heard?”

Julie said they had not really heard anything, just that Flowers was trying to find Luther Stallings to pay him back the money he owed Luther. Also that, while they had been sworn to secrecy, they would be willing to act as messengers.

“Messengers? What do you mean, messengers? Why do I need a messenger? Can’t you just tell me where he is?”

The boys exchanged looks. Flowers was busy managing his impatience, a skill he had acquired without ever quite internalizing, but despite his irritation, he did not fail to detect a spark of genuine friendship between them. It astonished him.

“We heard there was maybe, some kind of”—the boy turned bright red—“uh, beef.”

Flowers asked Titus, didn’t he know how to say anything? “You two remind me of the old man and that parrot,” he said. “Frick and Frack.”

He glanced through the door, across the deserted store to the front door. Feyd and Walter, Bankwell waiting in the hearse. Time to start the parade.

“Fine,” Flowers said. “I tell you what.” He reached into his breast pocket for his checkbook. Then and there, leaning on a stack of records, he wrote out a check in the amount of $25,000.00, payable to Luther Stallings. Signed it with a flourish that he hoped implied magnanimity. “There is no beef,” he said. “That was all a long time ago and far, far away. You can tell him I said that. Bygones be bygones.”

“Forgiveness is an attribute of the brave,” Titus said.

Julie almost smiled, looking pleased and dubious. But Flowers recognized it as one of forty-nine Proverbs, Meditations, and Words of Comfort printed in the last two pages of every funeral program that Flowers & Sons handed out.

“I’m going to have to be careful around you,” he said, handing the check over to Titus. “I can see that. Here. You take that to him. Put it in your wallet. You carry a wallet, don’t you?”

No, of course he did not, just a dense wad of small bills. So Alfalfa put the check into a toy plastic wallet he carried around. Flowers waited until this business had been seen to, concerned about the fate of that check, which he had postdated and would cancel first thing Monday morning.

“That’s no strings attached, right? He doesn’t have to forgive me. It’s his money, he can do what he wants with it. Got that? We good? All right. Now, I know you boys want to ride with the body.”