swallowing its own tail. I don’t know if I completely agree, but it was an interesting argument. Oh, I also picked up a really decent Out There.”
“I don’t go in for the hyperbole the way my partner does, Councilman,” Archy said. “You know that. And I apologize on his behalf for the disrespect, which you won’t hear any more of, or I’m going to kick his ass from here to the Carquinez Bridge. Right, Nat? But look here, if you come through for Gibson Goode, after all this time you been such a good customer to us, not to mention, you know, blessing us with the example of your coming in here and meeting some of your music needs from time to time, then with respect, excuse me, but you really did turn your back on us. Seems like.”
Flowers’s gaze slid over to the sleeping baby. He seemed to be seeing little Archy himself lying there, hearing some wah-wah echo of 1968.
“I sincerely hope that is not true,” he said, returning to the present. “I would miss this place, I truly, truly would. But a Dogpile Thang is going to be a real boon to the community.”
“The community.”
Ho, shit, Archy thought.
“The community!” Nat repeated.
“Be cool, Nat,” Archy said.
“Oh, sure, I’ll be cool. I’ll be really fucking cool when I’m down the street selling my blood plasma!”
“Nat . . .”
Having to sell his blood plasma was always Nat’s worst-case scenario, the example he gave to his son, his wife, his partner, anyone he needed to persuade of the dire expedients and financial ruin that loomed before him.
“You know, Councilman, I don’t know why, but I was under the impression that this place right . . . here”—and Nat pounded the counter, Right! Here!—“was a community! But I guess I was wrong.”
Nat reached under the counter and pulled out a copy of The Soul Vibrations of Man (Saturn Research, 1976) and hurled it across the room. You could hear it crack, a snapping like wood in a fire. Along with fretting about having recourse to selling his blood plasma, Nat liked to throw record albums, usually the slag. Alas, this one was rare and valuable.
“You can ask Gibson Goode and the community to find you a sealed original mono copy of The Soul Vibrations of Man. Because we’re closing. Right now. As of this moment. Why delay it? Why draw out the suffering? We are closing this store today. You can all leave, thank you very much for your support all these years. Goodbye, gentlemen.”
Flowers started to say something, to remonstrate with Nat, reproach him for the destruction of that beautiful disk. Thought better of it. Fixed those searching peepers on Archy one last time, seeming to see some kind of answer in Archy’s blankness.
“Well, then.” Flowers touched his fingers to the brim of his hat, bowed to the men at the counter. He walked out of the store, and the nephews took up their places on either side of him. “Enjoy your day. Mr. Jones, Mr. Singletary.”
“Gentlemen, goodbye,” Nat said.
The customers turned, looking dazed, Mr. Mirchandani and Moby appealing to Archy. Archy shrugged. “Sorry, fellas,” he said.
Archy picked up Rolando, snoozing in his caddy, and made a formal transfer of custody to the grandfather, England turning over Hong Kong, mournful trumpets of farewell, a weird ache in Archy’s heart like the forerunner or possibly the distant memory of tears. The men slipped from their stools and trooped out.
Mr. Jones stopped in the doorway, unhunched himself from the perpetual ghostly keyboard, and turned back. He shot a look at Nat in which sympathy and scorn contended. Fished his pipe and tobacco out of his hip pocket. Then, gesturing with the stem of the pipe toward Rolando as the King carried out the baby, Mr. Jones nodded to Archy. “You keep on practicing, Turtle,” he said. “You going to get it.”
“I hope I do, Mr. Jones.”
“You got the good heart. Underneath all the other stuff. Good heart is eighty-five percent of everything in life.”
Tears ran burning along the gutters of Archy’s eyes. Generally, he tried, following the example of Marcus Aurelius, to avoid self-pity, but Archy had not experienced a great deal of appreciation in his life for his good qualities, for his potential as a man. His mother had died when he was young, his father had bounced early on. The aunts who raised him died with their ignorance of his good qualities perfectly preserved. His wife, though no doubt she loved him, was the latest in a long line of experts and connoisseurs, reaching back through the army and high school to his aunties, to underrate the rarity and condition of Archy’s soul. Only Mr. Jones had always stopped to drop a needle in the long inward spiraling groove that encoded Archy, and listen to the vibrations. Even in the days when Mr. Jones’s wife was alive and he was sought after in the clubs and recording studios, halfway famous, he always seemed to have time for Turtle Stallings.
“Thanks, Mr. Jones,” Archy said.
“What is the other fifteen percent?” Nat said. “Just out of curiosity?”
“Politeness,” Mr. Jones said without hesitation. “And keeping a level head.”
Nat blushed and failed to meet Mr. Jones’s watery gaze.
“We got that gig tomorrow,” Mr. Jones said. “I’m a need my Leslie, boy.”
“And you will have it,” Archy said.
“Said it would be ready Sunday.”
“It will be.”
After the parrot had piloted Mr. Jones out of the store, Nat shut the door behind them. He bolted it, turned the sign so that it read CLOSED. “The ‘community,’” he muttered. He stood with his hand on the bolt, humming. Then he slid it back, pulled the door open, and ran out onto the sidewalk, shouting in the direction that Councilman Flowers had taken: “The community hasn’t made a decent record since 1989!”
Nat came back in—stomped, really—and repeated the business with the deadbolt. He went back around the counter and stood, breathing in and out, making an effort to calm himself, the pounding of his heart visible in his temples. He stopped in front of Archy and fixed him with a level stare.
“See, Archy, this is why I hate everyone and the world,” he said, as if there were some connection between these words and what had just happened, some sequence of events like a theory of Ornette Coleman and the lost horn men of Storyville. “This is why I hate my sad-ass little life.”
He snatched his hat from the hook, pulled it down tight over his head, and went out. Archy tried and failed to decide whether to take seriously any, some portion, or none of the things that Nat had said. He reached for the Penguin Meditations stashed at the ready in his hip pocket, but he knew without consulting it what Marcus was unlikely to suggest: the kind of solace a man could find in the heat and spice of Ethiopia, a rank sweet sauce on the fingertips.
Gwen Shanks was headed north on Telegraph Avenue, on her way to work a home birth in the Berkeley hills, when she found herself blown off course by an unbearable craving into the cumin-scented gloom of the Queen of Sheba. Steeled by a lifetime of training in the arts of repression, like Spock battling the septenary mating madness of the pon farr, Gwen had resisted the urges and surges of estrogen and progesterone for each of the first thirty-four weeks of her pregnancy, denying all cravings, battened down tight against hormonal gusts. In her patients, Gwen uniformly and with tenderness indulged the rages, transports, and panics, the crying jags and cupcake benders, but she was not in the habit of indulging herself. Though she was a midwife by profession, her life’s work was self-control. Two weeks earlier, however, without explanation, her husband had dropped by the offices of Berkeley Birth Partners bearing, satanically, a fateful Styrofoam cup filled with something called suff. Since that day Gwen had been plagued by an almost daily hankering for this chilled infusion of sesame seeds, its flavor bittersweet as regret. A black belt in Wing Chun–style kung fu, Gwen had spent the morning in the dojo of the Bruce Lee Institute, working out for over two hours with her master, Irene