to somebody first. Maybe Huey be satisfied with what you already did to fuck Popcorn up for him.”
A fog began to blur the prospect of Oakland spread beneath them. Silence gathered around the friends until it felt like something profound. The coals of their cigarettes flared and crackled. The fog hissed like carbonation in a drink.
“You remember what your uncle Oogie used to do on your birthday, at Christmas?” Chan said finally. “All ‘Yeah, uh, listen, I was going to get you a air rifle.’” His imitation of Oogie’s mumbly drawl was flawless. “Expecting you to be as grateful as if he did give it to you. Now I’m supposed to say, ‘Uh, yeah, Huey, I was going to kill Popcorn Hughes for you, but, uh . . .’?”
“Why not?”
“‘Why not?’” Chan said, making it come out high and childish. “Easy for you to say. Tell me this. You get down there on that movie set, are you going to forget your lines? Tell the director, ‘Uh, yeah, I meant to memorize that shit, but, uh . . .’?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“No!”
“Then why do you want me to do it?”
“Come on, then,” Luther said. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
“Let’s, uh, let’s get out of here. You come with me. Down to L.A. Hide out down there. San Pedro. Long Beach.” Trying to summon or feign enthusiasm for his proposal. “Yeah, Ensenada.”
It was too dark for Chan to see what was not in Luther’s eyes and too dark for Luther to see him missing it.
Chan stood up and dropped the .45 into his hip pocket. It rattled against the extra shotgun rounds. “I woke up this morning,” he said, “had all kinds of beautiful intentions. Prove myself to the Supreme Servant of the People, take a major annoyance off his hands. Move in, move up, maybe in a year I’m running the Oakland chapter. Then I get my eye on the account books. See what kind of holes might be in them, waste and whatnot. Bring a little more structure, a little more discipline. Now, no. Nuh-uh. Now I just have to make it right. You go on, though. Go on, Luther, and get your good thing.”
His voice broke, and from the crack in it emerged the voice of the boy he recently was. Fiercely shy and bookish, absorbing without saturation, on behalf of his sisters and his baby brother, the endless seep of the elder Flowers’s venom. At the memory of that vanished boy, Luther regretted, without entirely renouncing, his earlier disloyal thoughts. He put his arm around the professorial shoulders of his friend. “It’s already too wrong, Chan,” he said. “No way you can make it right.”
“That is probably true.”
“You got to leave. Come on. Come to L.A., hole up. Ride it out.”
“I appreciate the gesture, Luther,” Chan said. “I already troubled you sufficiently.”
“Then go somewhere else.”
“Where?”
“Anywheres that a bus could take you.”
“Maybe I will,” Chan said, to end the conversation.
When the peppermint brandy was drunk, they got up and left behind them the spot where a forgotten dreamer of the California dream had planned to have his glory notarized by fire. Turned and hiked, sliding, back down to the car. After a silent drive to the bottom of the city, the blue dome of the Greyhound station loomed before them like a promise of adventure. There was an OPD cruiser parked at the curb when they pulled up, but before they could consider bailing on the bus station plan, a cop came strolling out of the station, got back into the car, and drove away.
Luther had three hundred dollars in his wallet, 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
