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.”
“Hypothetical? Hypothetical, if that man’s hair was on fire, I would not piss on his head to put it out.”
She put her sunglasses back on.
“That’s just a theory, though,” Archy said. “We don’t need to test it.”
She nodded, chewing her lip, and he saw that under the lipstick, it was already ragged with chewing.
“Go on, Valletta,” he said, pressing the money on her. “If you promise not to tell me where he’s living at, or what he’s doing, or how bad he looks, or give me any information at all, that’s worth eighty-seven to me right there.”
She considered it. Her tongue emerged from her lips and ran around her mouth once hungrily. Then she knitted up the money in her long fingers and made it vanish so quickly and completely that she might have been alluding to the length of time it was likely to spend in her pocket. She would not take the empty DVD box.
“Nah, y’all keep that, anyway. He got five more just like it.”
“All right.”
He took the box, Jack with a handful of beans, already awash in eighty-seven dollars’ worth of regret over his own stupidity.
“Maybe I should come back next week,” Valletta said, and a smile lacking one lower bicuspid made a brave appearance along the lowermost regions of her face. “Come up with a few more things about him you don’t want to hear, see what that gets me.”
“Funny,” Archy said.
“Don’t worry, you won’t see me again.”
“Valletta—”
She’d started for the Toronado, but he called her back.
“Come on,” he told her. “You got to say it.”
During the summer of 1978, Valletta’s summer, the T-shirt shops of urban America had offered for sale an iron-on transfer that depicted Valletta Moore in a bell-bottom zebra-print pantsuit, surrounded by the glitter-balloon letters of the catchphrase with which she would forever be associated, first spoken in Strutter at Large. The iron-ons were produced by Roach, kings of the rubber transfer, who had divided all the profits, presumably considerable, with retailers and the movie’s distributors.
“You want me to say it?” she said, doubtful, pleased.
“I think eighty-seven dollars buys me that,” Archy said.
She sighed, pumped her fist once, like it was the head of a very heavy hammer, and said, “Do what you got to do.” The fist burst apart in slow motion, fingers blooming. “And stay fly.”
She wrestled
