Read Telegraph Avenue for Free Online

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 that it had been painted top to bottom, matte black paint effacing the line that marked the bottom edge of Batman’s cowl, paint sprayed over the heroic molded chin dimple, the affable molded smile. Behind the mask, Chan’s eyes glistened like organs exposed by two incisions.
    “Jungle action,” Chan said behind the baffle of the mask. “Oh, and by the way.” He shouldered open the passenger door and sprang out of the car. The shotgun in the garbage bag hung by his side like a workaday implement. “ ‘Toronado’ doesn’t mean shit.”
    Chan’s right arm snaked into the mouth of the garbage bag as, with his left hand, he grabbed hold of the brass handle of the upholstered front door of the club. He yanked the door open, flinging his right arm out to the side. The garbage bag flew off, revealing the riot gun that Chan had checked out that afternoon from the basement arsenal of a Panther safe house in East Oakland. There was a gust of horns, palaver, and thump, and then the door breathed shut behind Chan. The garbage bag caught on a thermal hook and spun in the air, teased and tugged by unseen hands.
    Luther lowered the volume on the in-dash eight-track. City silence, the sigh of a distant bus, the tide of the interstate, Grover Washington, Jr., setting faint, intricate fires up and down the length of “Trouble Man.” Beyond that, nothing. Luther felt his attention beginning not so much to wander as to migrate, seeking opportunity elsewhere. Far down the coast highway, at the wheel of his beautiful green muscle car, he made his way to Los Angeles, capital of the rest of his life. In a helicopter shot, he watched himself rolling across an arcaded bridge with the ocean and the dawn and the last of the night spread out all around him.
    He heard the stuttering crack of a number of firearms discharging at once. The door of the Bit o’ Honey banged open again, spraying horns and shouts. Chan came out at a running walk. He got into the car and slammed the door. Blood streaked his left shoe like a bright feather. The shotgun gave off its sweet, hellish smell, electricity and sizzling fatback.
    Luther shifted into first gear, standing on the gas pedal, balanced on it, and on the moment like the trumpeter angel you saw from the Warren Freeway, perched at the tip of the Mormon temple, riding the wild spin of the world itself. Everything Detroit could muster in the way of snarling poured from the 450 engine. They parlayed a dizzying string of green lights all the way to Claremont Avenue. It had been a case of love at first sight for Luther and the Toronado two days before, at a used-car lot down on Broadway. Now, as they tore up Telegraph, something slid coiling through his belly, more like a qualm of lust. Chan tossed his brother’s Halloween mask out of the open window, slid the gun under the seat. He peeled away the gloves and started to throw them out, too, but in the end seemed to want to hold on to them, the right one bloody and powder-burned, a while longer. He sat there clutching them in one fist like a duelist looking for someone to