Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon Read Free Book Online Page A

branching out, beefing up their website, even, yes, selling coffee drinks and pastries and chai, he ran into heavy resistance from Nat. Not just resistance; the man would shut down the conversation, shut himself down, with that infuriating, self-righteous Abraham the Patriarch way he had sometimes, acting as if he and Archy were not a couple of secondary-market retailers trying to stay afloat but guardians of some ancient greatness that must never be tainted or altered. When really (like any religion, Archy supposed), it was a compound of OCD and existential panic, a displaced fear of change. Reroutings of familiar traffic patterns, new watermarks and doodads on the national currency, revised rules for the bundling of recyclables, such things were anathema to Nat Jaffe. Fresh starts, clean slates, reboots: anathema. He stood against them like an island in the flow, a snag of branches.
    “You want a fucking macchiato?” he had said a couple of days earlier, throwing a record album at Archy, nothing too valuable, just a copy of Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson at the Opera House (Verve, 1957), Getz sitting in with Johnson, Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and Connie Kay. “Here’s your fucking macchiato!”
    Meaning, sweet light froth of a white guy on top of a dense dark bottom of black. The shot had gone wide, but damn, a flying record, the thing could have sliced Archy’s head off. Archy found himself annoyed just thinking about it now. It annoyed him as well that Mr. Mirchandani had mentioned the espresso machine, even though he knew that Mr. Mirchandani was only trying to help out, take up the cause, join the chorus of those who did not want to see Brokeland die. There was no mistaking the fact that Nat was on high simmer today, perhaps two bubbles away from a full-on roll.
    “Gentlemen.”
    It was a mild voice, the voice of a man trained to extol the highest in men and women while seeing them at their lowest. Trained to seemliness, to keeping itself soft and low under the pall of remembrance and grief that forever hung over Flowers & Sons. At the sound of that funereal voice, its head cocked in Singletary’s direction, the African grey parrot began to give out, note-perfect, Cochise Jones’s reading of the old Mahalia Jackson spiritual “Trouble of the World,” found on Mr. Jones’s only album as a bandleader, Redbonin’ (CTI, 1973).
    “Look out,” Mr. Jones said, but as usual, Fifty-Eight was way ahead of him.
    I n the shade of a wide-brimmed black hat whose vibe wavered between crime boss and Henry Fonda in Once upon a Time in the West , pin-striped gray-on-charcoal three-piece, black wing tips shined till they shed a perceptible halo, Chan Flowers came into the store. Slid himself through the front door, ineluctable as a final notice from the county. Straight-backed, barrel-chested, bowlegged. A model of probity, a steady hand to reassure the grieving, a sober man—a grave man—solid as the pillar of a tomb. A good dose of gangster to the hat to let you know the councilman played his politics old-school, with a shovel in the dark of the moon. Plus that touch of Tombstone, of Gothic western undertaker, like maybe sometimes when the moon was full and Flowers & Sons stood empty and dark but for the vigil lights, Chan Flowers might up and straddle a coffin, ride it like a bronco.
    “Looks like we have ourselves the hard core here today,” he said, quickly tallying the faces at the counter before settling on Archy, a question in his eyes, something he wanted to know. “Wait out here,” he told his nephews.
    The two Flowers nephews stayed out on the sidewalk. Like all of Mr. Flowers’s younger crop of nephews, they seemed not to be wearing their ill-fitting black suits so much as to be squatting inside them until some less embarrassing habitation came along. They had the solemn faces of practical jokers waiting to spring a gag. One of them took out a book of Japanese math puzzles and started working them with a stub