Telegraph Avenue. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ Goode, being Gibson Goode, Mr. Nostalgia supposed, might have had no choice in the matter: He kept, as his legend said he must, his cool. The same quiet, restraining hand against his bodyguard’s chest. Unintimidated. Still smiling. He took out his wallet, opened it, and counted out ten bills, rapid-fire. Slid them across the signing table. Luther Stallings studied them, head down, chest rising and falling. The money lay there, exciting comment in the line, ten duplicate cards from the highly collectable Dead Presidents series. Luther shook his head once. Then he reached down and took the money. Resigned—long since resigned, Mr. Nostalgia thought—to doing things he knew he was going to regret. When he went past Mr. Nostalgia’s table, without so much as a thank-you, he had not managed to get his chin up again.

      It was only later, as a voice on the PA was chasing stragglers from the hall and the lights went out over the signing area, that Mr. Nostalgia noticed Luther Stallings had walked off with his gold pen.

      On a Saturday night in August 1973, outside the Bit o’ Honey Lounge, a crocodile-green ’70 Toronado sat purring its crocodile purr. Its chrome grin stretched beguiling and wide as the western horizon.

      “Define ‘toronado,’” said the man riding shotgun.

      Behind his heavy-rimmed glasses, he had sleepy eyes, but he scorned sleep and frowned upon the somnolence of others. In defiance of political fashion, he greased his long hair, and its undulant luster was clear-coat deep. His name was Chandler Bankwell Flowers III. His grandfather, father, and uncles were all morticians, men of sobriety and pomp, and he inhabited a floating yet permanent zone of rebellion against them. Nineteen months aboard the Bon Homme Richard had left Chan Flowers with an amphetamine habit and a tattoo of Tuffy the Ghost on the inside of his left forearm. The shotgun, holstered in a plastic trash bag alongside his right leg, was a pump-action Mossberg 500.

      “‘Define’ it?” said the driver, Luther Stallings, not giving the matter his full attention. His eyes, green flecked with gold, kept finding excuses to visit the rearview mirror. “It’s the name of a car.”

      “But what does it mean? What is the definition of the word ‘toronado.’ Tell me that.”

      “You tell me,” Luther said, more wary now.

      “It’s a question.”

      “Yeah, but what are you really asking?”

      “Toro-nah-do.” Chan strumming the “R” like a string of Ricky Ricardo’s guitar. “You’re driving it. Talking about it. In love with it. Don’t even know what it means.”

      Luther massaged the leather cover on the steering wheel as if feeling for a cyst. He took another glance in the mirror, then leaned forward to look past Chan at the Bit o’ Honey’s front door. Where Chan ran to dark and stocky, Luther Stallings was long and light-skinned, with an astronaut chin. He had served one tour in the U.S. Army, most of it spent splintering planks with his feet for a hand-to-hand combat demonstration team. He was dressed as for dancing, tight plaid bell-bottom slacks, a short-sleeved terry pullover. His hair rose freshly stoked into a momentous Afro.

      “I believe it is Spanish,” Luther said. “A common expression, can be loosely translated to ‘suck my dick.’”

      “Vulgar language,” Chan said, drawing on his rich patrimony of improving maxims. That stiff mortuary grammar, hand-beaten into him by his old man, had always embarrassed him when they were youngsters. In this hoodlum revolutionary phase he was going through, Chan flaunted the properness of his speech, a lily in the lapel of a black leather car coat. “Always the first and last refuge of the man with nothing to say.”

      Luther broke free of the mirror to look at Chan. “Toronado,” he said, employing the imperative.

      “You don’t know, do you?” Chan said. “Just admit. You are driving around, you paid three thousand dollars for this vehicle, cash, for all you know, a toronado’s, what, might be some kind of brush you use for cleaning a Mexican toilet bowl.”

      “I don’t care what it—”

      “Juanita, quick, get the toronado, I have diarrhea—”

      “It means a bullfighter!” Luther said, rising to the bait despite long experience, despite needing to keep one eye on the rearview and one on the diamond-tufted vinyl door of the lounge, in spite of wanting to be a hundred years and a thousand miles away from this place and this night. “A fighter of bulls.”

      “In Spanish,” Chan suggested in a mock-helpful tone.

      Luther shrugged. When Chan was nervous, he got bored, and when he got bored, he would start trouble, any kind of trouble, just to break the tedium. But there was more to this line of questioning. Chan was mad at Luther and trying to hide it. Had been trying for days to hold his anger close, like the Spartan boy with the fox in his shirt, let it feast on his intestines rather than cop to hiding it.

      “‘Bullfighter,’” Chan said with bitter precision, “is torero.”

      He bent down to scoop a handful of twelve-gauge cartridges from a box between his feet and pocketed them at the hip of his tweed blazer. His hair, heavy with pomade, gave off a dismaying odor of flowers left too long in a vase, putrid as envy itself.

      “Then uh, ‘tornado,’” Luther tried.

      This was such a contemptible suggestion that Chan, who generally never lacked for verbal expressions of contempt, could dignify it only with a smirking shake of his head. Luther was about to point out that it was he, the ignorant one, who’d just laid down thirty-two hundred-dollar bills for the beautiful car with the mysterious name, while Professor Flowers remained a frequent denizen of the buses.

      “Chan, you captious motherfucker—” he began, but then stopped.

      From another pocket of his tweed blazer, patches on the elbows, Chan drew a pair of sateen gloves, dark purplish blue. Shoddy things, busted at the seams, tricked out with pointy fish fins. Last Halloween, Chan’s little brother, Marcel, out trick-or-treating in a Batman suit, had been hit by a car and killed. Drunken negroes in a Rambler American, boy stepping off the curb with his face too small to really fit the eyeholes of the mask. Chan had some tiny hands, but even so, the gloves were a tight fit, and as he pulled them on, they split some more.

      When Luther saw Chan wearing Marcel’s purple crime-fighting gloves, he didn’t know what to say. He threw another glance at the rearview: Telegraph Avenue nocturne, a submarine wobble of light and shadow. Chan reached into the garbage bag, came out with a bat-eared mask stamped from flimsy plastic. He slipped the elastic string over the back of his head, parked the borrowed face at the top of his forehead.

      “Okay,” Luther said at last, the second smartest boy in the room every day of his life from 1955 to the day in 1971 that had Chan shipped out, “tell me what it means.”

      A girl, at key points also constructed like the car along a beguiling x axis, came out of the Bit o’ Honey Lounge. She wore tight white jeans whose flared legs bellied like sails. Her hair was tied back shiny against her head to emerge aft in a big puffball. Her feet rode the howdahs of swaying platform sandals. As she sauntered past the car, she pulled the tails of her short-sleeved madras shirt from the waist of her jeans, knotting them together under her breasts.

      “That’s it,” Luther said. He pressed down on the clutch and readied his hand on the gearshift. “Go if you’re going.”

      Chan lowered the mask over his face, and Luther saw СКАЧАТЬ