“Y’all can just continue on your way.”
He could see that it was not Luther at the wheel. Any one of a number of interstellar fuckups and freakazoids might be at the helm of this broke-down starship of the seventies, but Archy’s thoughts leaped with a bitter instinct to Valletta Moore.
Sure enough. A lamentable lamentation of the door hinges, sounding like the gate on a crypt filled with vengeful dead folks being thrown open, and Valletta Moore got out of the car. Big-boned, shapely, on the fatal side of fifty, high-waisted, high-breasted, face a feline triangle. Beer-bottle-brown eyes, skin luminous and butterscotch, as if she herself had come fresh from the spray gun of Sixto Cantor. Ten, eleven years since the last time Archy had seen her, at least.
“Uh-oh. Look out.”
“I know you remember me,” she said.
“I remember you didn’t used to be quite as fine as you are now.”
“‘Look out,’” Valletta quoted back at him, shaking her head, lowering over her amber eyes a pair of bulbous sunglasses with white plastic frames. “I guess I know where you learned that shit.”
Looking at her, already smelling her perfume, Archy’s memory dealt him a rapid hand of images, of which the ace was unquestionably the grand soft spectacle of Valletta Moore, 1978, shaving her legs at his father’s apartment in El Cerrito, glimpsed through the five-inch crack of the open bathroom door. Slender right foot planted on the floor, other foot arched on the shining lip of the bathtub, Valletta bent like a watchmaker over the work of painting a brown razor stripe up the white lathered inside of her long left leg, hair wrapped in a towel but her strong body naked and bold as a flag. The architecture of her ass was something deeper than a memory to Archy, something almost beyond remembrance, an archetype, the pattern of all asses forever after, wired into the structure of reality itself.
“Valletta,” he said, thinking she still looked good, then abandoning all wisdom and ignoring his Spidey sense long enough to let her take him in her arms, the skin of her bare shoulder in a halter top cool against his shoulder, the lady most definitely giving off that heavy 1978 Spencer’s smell of love candles and sandalwood incense but, laid over top of it, the stink of cigarette, the instant-potatoes smell you might find in the interior of a beat-to-shit Toronado. “Damn.”
It was only when she let go of Archy that he saw the tight line of her lips. She looked left, right. She was worried, hiding, running: running to Archy. In the pit of his sensitive belly, neurotransmitters registered with a flutter of dread whatever kind of trouble his father was currently getting himself into. Already thinking it might have something to do with Chandler Flowers, his father’s best friend, back in the day. How Flowers had come into the store today, asking, of all things, Your dad around? Luther reported to have been down in West Hollywood someplace, last Archy heard, not that he ever sought the least news or information of Luther’s who-, what-, where-, when- or whyabouts.
“Well, it sure has been a long time, Valletta,” he said cheerfully, deciding to pretend that he believed she had been driving Luther’s car down Sixty-first Street, happened to see him on his front porch, and decided to stop and say hello. As if she could have stared clean through 175 pounds and thirty years to recognize the teenager in whose dreams she briefly but intensely featured. “I do have to be running, because I got to, you know, get to the store, but, hey—”
“Archy, no, no, wait, hold up—”
“You have a good day, now. All right? No, really. I’m sorry. But you have a positive day.”
Back when he was a boy, there used to be a gentleman named Joseph Charles, man would stand out every day at the corner of Oregon and Grove wearing a pair of dazzling yellow gloves. Waving to every car that passed him, extending to its driver, regardless of race, creed, or receptivity, one (1) genuine, heartfelt greeting. Mr. Charles’s manner bold and cheerful but a touch formal, hinting, though not in any unkind way, at the impersonal. No intention of greeting you in particular; simply reminding you that, like all humans, you partook in the noble human capacity for being greeted. It was Mr. Charles’s manner that Archy tended to adopt around women when he sensed they might be about to pose him some kind of problem. He gave Valletta’s shoulder a fond squeeze, started away. In his heart, he already knew that he was not going to get anywhere; not yet. Like many abandoned sons, he was conscious of owing a mysterious, unrepayable debt toward the man of whom, in truth, he was the eternal creditor.
“Archy, it’s your dad,” she said, tendering that unpayable IOU, “it’s Luther.”
She raised the sunglasses at him and hit him straight on with twin blasts of yellow-brown fire, with the shock of the bitter work of time and corruption. Cakes of mascara cobwebbed her lashes.
“Yeah?”
Valletta checked out the shadows and rustlings up and down both ends of the street one more time, ran the broom of her paranoia up the quiet little pond of a street built around a pocket playground that some unknown amateur of children had tucked, like an Easter egg, onto an island of grass in the midst of Sixty-first Street. Archy wondered if Valletta might not be high, cashed out on something that was making her go all Pynchonesque. The last time he found himself unable to prevent hearing news of Luther, it was a tale, grand and heartwarming, of cleanness, sobriety, redemption. Luther had drawn a judge down south who remembered Strutter and, never having been the man’s son, was willing to take a chance on Luther Stallings, divert him to a drug court. Luther went around after that, supposedly, making amends to 17,512 people on two continents. That was at least a year ago, and the amends that Archy consented to allow his father to make to him at the time had consisted, in full, of a sober, clean telephone promise to leave Archy the fuck alone from now until the end of time.
“Can we go in?” she wanted to know, sighing, impatient, maybe, he thought desperately, only needing to pee. “Inside your house?”
“Huh-uh,” Archy said, not trying to charm or work her anymore, the deep 1978 El Cerrito–apartment sullenness starting to seep out of him as he remembered how Luther and Valletta used to leave him there all night by himself, nothing on the television but Wolfman Jack and some movie where a shark-toothed devil doll was biting Karen Black on the ankles. Only thing he wanted to know now: what kind of bullshit trouble Luther Stallings was trying to get Archy into this go-round and how much it was going to cost in blood and treasure. “Just say what you came to say. No joke, Valletta, I really do have to go.”
“Mm-hmm, yeah, you ain’t changed,” she said, lighting up icy diodes at the heart of those eyes that, in the summer of 1977, had stared not only into Archy’s soul but into the soul of young black America from the covers of Jet and Sepia and from the feathers-fur-and-leather kung fu splendors of her role as Candygirl Clark in one of the last blaxploitation films of that era, Strutter at Large, in which she costarred with a lean, wiry, and beautiful Luther Stallings in his most famous part. “Still walking around all pinch-up and pouty-face, giving everybody a fish-eye, most of all your father or his friend.”
“Y’all are still friends, then.”
“We took up with each other again. Third time, you know what they say.”
Archy had contrived to miss the second near-fatal intersection of Luther and Valletta by cleverly timing his service in the United States Army to coincide with the geopolitical hard-on of Saddam Hussein.
“He back in town, then?”
She stared him down, challenging him, not wanting to give up anything if he was going to make her stand out on the damn sidewalk to say it.
“And now
