Telegraph Avenue. Michael Chabon
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all that was left of his up-front money. He handed it over to Chan, “’Kay, then,” he said.
They stood facing each other at the back of the Toronado. Its taillights were slits as narrow as the eyes in the Batman mask, a skeptical squint regarding them. The friends exchanged a couple of palm slaps. Each clasped the other briefly to his chest. Chan offered up some parting bullshit about catching a northbound up to Alaska, or maybe head south, work those shrimp boats down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was all smoke. Chan had never been a boy to leave food on a plate, a math problem without a solution, an open pussy unfucked. He wasn’t going to go into the bus station, get on a bus for North Nowhere. Soon as Luther left, he would get busy finishing, for the sake of finishing, the trouble he had started.
“Seriously,” Luther said. “What you going to do?”
“You don’t need to know, Luther. Tell you this, though, whatever it is? When I’m done, I’m going to be able to hold my head up high.”
“I know that’s true.”
“See you do the same down there. Comport your ass with dignity. Do what you have to do.”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
Luther tried not to show his impatience, his eagerness to get quit of Chandler Bankwell Flowers III and his cup of clabbered ambition. To get quit of Oakland and Berkeley and all the local fools. The broken promises, the pyres that never got lit.
“You are having good luck right now,” Chan said. “Good luck is good. But that’s all it is, you dig? Not any kind of a substitute for doing what you have to do.”
Luther nodded, said, “No doubt, no doubt,” thinking about the ads you used to see in the pages of Ebony and Esquire selling the long, low, smiling crocodile of 1970, the slogan across the top of the page: WOULDN’T IT BE NICE TO HAVE AN ESCAPE MACHINE?
“I know what it means,” Luther said.
“Huh?” Chan said. “What—”
“I can define ‘toronado.’”
Chan frowned, remembered, frowned more deeply. “Do it, then,” he said.
Luther shook his head. “You don’t need to know,” he said.
Then he strapped himself into his escape machine, and headed for the Nimitz Freeway, San Jose, Los Angeles: the world and the fortune that awaited him.
Popcorn Hughes, Luther heard afterward, was shot to death early that morning in his bed at Summit Hospital. The only suspect was the unknown, unidentified black male who had been described, by witnesses to the first attack at the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, as wearing a mask that was meant, it was generally agreed, to resemble the one worn in Marvel comics by the Black Panther, the first black superhero.
The killer was never apprehended. The Toronado overheated in the Grapevine just north of Lebec and had to be towed across the L.A. County line.
“He’s looking for investors,” Archy guessed.
Valletta affected to study some scene or detail in the distance, beyond the playground, beyond Berkeley, beyond Mount Lassen, saying nothing, infinitesimally shaking her head, mouth down-twisted in a way that might have been disapproving of Archy, Luther, herself, or some combination thereof, arms crossed furiously under her breasts: unable to believe, finally, that she was party to this latest bullshit scheme of Luther’s, or that Archy declined to be party to it, or perhaps that the world did not and never would appreciate the genius of Luther Stallings.
“He still talking about that damn movie?”
“What d’you think?”
She rummaged around in her bag and took out what appeared to be a boxed set of three DVDs entitled The Strutter Trilogy. Its cover featured a handsome close-up shot of the long-jawed, Roman-nosed, Afro-haloed, 1973-vintage Luther Stallings as master thief Willie Strutter, and it promised restored or digital versions of three films: Strutter, Strutter at Large, and Strutter Kicks It Old-School. But it was an empty hunk of packaging with no disks inside, and on closer inspection, it proved to have been painstakingly crafted from the cardboard case to a Complete Back to the Future box set over whose panels had been pasted vivid but crudely executed cut-and-paste computer artwork, a minor but necessary bit of imposture, since, as far as Archy knew—and he knew far; too far—there was no such movie as Strutter Kicks It Old-School.
“Strutter 3. Is that right? Going to write and direct and star! Triple threat! Going to make it fast, cheap, and badass, like they used to do back in the day. Old-school. And you’re going to be his leading lady. That the story he sent you here to tell me, Valletta?”
Out of gentlemanly impulses and, worse, feeling sorry for this woman, one of a string he had auditioned during his childhood for the role of Archy’s New Mother, Archy struggled to keep a tone of derision from creeping into his voice as he offered this bit of informed speculation as to Luther’s line—phrases such as “triple threat” and “fast, cheap, and badass” having formed part of his father’s formulary of bullshit over the years. He did not entirely succeed. The only thing lamer than the piece-of-shit plan Luther had come up with for peeling money loose from Archy, for a film that he had not the least intention of making, was the idea that Luther thought his son would give him anything ever again.
“He’s going to put in a nice big part for you. That right, Valletta? Maybe somehow it turns out Candygirl wasn’t dead all along?”
He detected a ripple along the muscles of her cheek. She held on to her silence, watching as Tibetan flags strung from the front porch of the Sandersons’ house across the park bade their random prayers farewell.
“We’re in preproduction,” she said at last. Defiant, lying the lie.
“So you, what, you have a script?”
“Nah, but your dad, he has the story all figured out. Told me the whole thing, every character, every shot, every minute of screen time, told it ten different ways five hundred times. Archy, it’s gonna be good.”
“Kind of a, what, Strutter comes out of retirement, one last job, gets his revenge type of thing?”
“You want to hear how it goes?”
Archy closed his eyes, anticipating the tedious madness of the scenario that he was about to be pitched, some kind of incoherent mashup of Ocean’s Eleven, The Matrix, and Death Wish, his father’s favorite movie, interlarded with a thick ribbon drawn from the saga of whatever kind of bullshit landlord trouble or IRS trouble or dental trouble his father and the lady had gotten themselves into. But Valletta fell silent again, and he opened his eyes to find a lone tear lingering on her cheek, a tiny solitary pool of outrage or shame. He felt his heart sink and drew another draft on his endless reserve of misplaced guilt. He took out his billfold and conducted a sorry inventory therein.
“Nah,” she said, pushing away from her the bills that emerged, four crisp twenties, a faded five, and two soft, crumpled ones. “Nah, never mind. Keep your money. I didn’t come here to bother you for money. I know you don’t believe that—”
“Sure, I—”
“And I did not come here to bother you with that motherfucking movie you and I both know ain’t ever going to get made.”
“Okay.”
“I know if I told you your dad was in trouble because of the drugs, you wouldn’t feel inclined to help him in any way, shape, or form, and since I got with the program, fourteen months and nine days clean and sober, I respect that position, and so does he. What I want to ask you is, what if we was in some other kind of trouble, didn’t have nothing to do with using? Would you possibly be willing to help him out then?”
“What did he do?”
Again the careful study of the street, the neighboring trees and houses. “I don’t really know,” she said. “But hypothetical.”