nothing about it. Man knew I was here . . .” She chewed on the earpiece of her sunglasses, seeming to rehearse Luther’s anger in her mind. “He knows how you feel, he wants to respect that.”
“So you don’t want money.”
“Truly,” she said, “I do. I’ll take whatever you can spare me. We need to get far away from here and stay there.”
It did not take a lot of effort for Archy to harden his heart against his father; that clay was well fired, long and slow. Anger, resentment, scorn, disgust, Luther’s son kept these handy in the pocket of his soul as surely as the copy of Meditations at his hip. So it must testify to something, some abiding foolishness peculiar to the sons of broken fathers, that it took any effort at all. Thirty-six years of this shit, and Archy was still willing to let the man disappoint him.
“I’m not going to ask why,” Archy said. “Because if you don’t tell me, then I won’t know.”
“Archy, I can’t get into it out here.”
“I am so fine with that, Valletta.”
“Your daddy . . . Luther . . .” She tried for a couple of seconds, pursing her lips, tapping them pensively with her right fist, to put it into words. Then she gave up. “He been clean and sober thirteen months now.”
“Uh-huh. Good for him.”
“And, like, now he got some irons in the fire.”
“I bet he does,” Archy said, thinking that was the perfect expression to describe the future as it stood in permanent relation to Luther Stallings: a big pile of irons glowing red-hot, to be snatched from the fire only at the cost of singed flesh. “Investment opportunities, that right?”
She fell back once more on her optic beams, but either this time Archy was ready or the effect had begun to dull. She lowered the sunglasses again.
“Let me guess,” Archy said. “Because I am experiencing premonitions.”
Chan and Luther unhooked a heavy chain between two pillars, left the Toronado tucked into a fold of midnight at the back of a gravel parking lot. Crunched up a hillside through fumes of eucalyptus, Chan carrying the shotgun, to a lookout they at one time favored for planning their conquests of the world. At their spot Chan turned and swung the gun, let it fly. It helicoptered out into the night and came whipping down with a clang of pipe somewhere in the woods behind them. Then they sat on their bench, perched side by side on the high shoulder of Oakland. Looked out at streets and bridges and highways embroidered, stitched out, in lights onto dark panels of water and sky.
In the interest of furthering his stone-cold pistolero legend, of which purity was to form a key component, the Undertaker never drank and rarely smoked. Luther passed him a package of Kools, and the Undertaker took one and lit it. Luther fished a fifth of Rumple Minze from his jacket pocket. The Undertaker surrendered the last fragment of his stillborn legend to the possibility of solace offered by the bottle of schnapps.
“He grabbed hold of his wrist, sat there looking at it,” Chan said, wiping his lips. “Meat and blood. A stump. All calm and collected, cuff of his jacket shot up to threads. Just a rag where his hand used to be, looking at it.”
“Popcorn Hughes,” Luther said admiringly.
“I need to hide myself, Luther.”
“Where at?” Dread inflated a taut balloon in Luther’s rib cage. He could barely muster breath to get out the next syllables: “L.A.?”
For that was the obvious solution: Swing by Luther’s mother’s house and pick up the canvas suitcase and the three Berkeley Farms crates, packed and ready to go. Hit L.A. by morning, Chan could buy what he needed when they got there. Track down some shitbox safe house where Chan could hole up. Wave goodbye then. Engage in the theater of turning their separate ways, meeting their respective fates, until the next of his friend’s schemes went wrong, the next time Chan found himself confronting the truth that his faith in himself was misplaced, his intelligence fated to go unrewarded because it was no substitute for luck, no proof against the world’s massive, even hostile, indifference to the productions of a black man’s intellect. Like the Party he had joined too late, too young, Chan was a lost claim check, a series of time-lapse photos of a promise as it broke. He was a king of finite space, bound in a nutshell. And Luther was sick of it. He rued all the time he had wasted since the call came from his agent, feeling guilty, feeling sorry for Chan.
“Or,” he said, trying to be helpful, “uh, lot of Panthers in Chicago, right?”
Chan didn’t say anything.
“Morocco, then. Or Spain.”
“Spain,” Chan said. Luther could hear the hard little smile creasing his face. “Good thinking. Go to Spain. Become a toronado.”
“Why not? All the revolutionary Negroes been skipping to Morocco, Spain. Paris. You were doing their business. They got to take care of you.”
“Who?”
“The Party.”
“Luther, if I had the kind of clout, get myself that far away from here? I wouldn’t have needed to impress anybody in the first place with the fool thing I just tried to do.”
Somewhere right around here, Luther remembered, if you went farther up the path behind the picnic tables, you would stumble across a pyramid of built-up stones left behind by some crazy old beard-faced poet back when Oakland was nothing but a slough and a stables and a cowboy hotel. In school they came here on field trips, checking out the poet’s little white farmhouse, a big lumpy statue of him riding on a Mongoloid-looking horse. A pyramid of stone and, farther back, a stone platform the man had built, intending it to be used for his funeral pyre. Out here in the hot sun, day after day, the man piling up rocks like lines in one of his boring poems. Dreaming, the whole time he was stacking those rocks, about how all those olden-time gangsters of Oakland, those whoring, robbing, land-grabbing Indian killers, opium addicts and loot seekers down there in the flatlands, how some fine night they were going to look up here at this green slope and marvel at the spectacle of a burning poet. Nothing ever came of that plan, far as Luther could recall. But then that was the general tendency of plans.
“If you’re a fool,” Luther said, “what’s that make me?”
This was a question that could never be answered, and Luther carried swiftly on to the next.
“Why’d I want to go and mess up my good thing driving your murder taxi around West Oakland?” he said. “Tell me that? So the Marxist gangsters can roll over the running-dog capitalist gangsters, take over their drugs and cash flow?”
“Leave, then,” Chan said. “You’re not in this. You go on and get.”
Before Luther could begin to feign that he was not entertaining this generous suggestion, there was a flicker of moonlight, like the bright quick of a fingernail, at the corner of his eye. Chan was pondering a handgun. Taken like the shotgun, no doubt, from the Party arsenal that it was Chan’s official duty to keep inventoried, secret, and in fighting shape. A .45, a handsome piece, probably brand-new. Luther’s heart misgave at the way Chan was balancing it on both palms, weighing it like a heavy book that held a heavy answer.
“What you going to do with that?” Luther said.
“Try
