Telegraph Avenue: A Novel by Michael Chabon

Author:Michael Chabon
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780061493348
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2012-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

III

A Bird of Wide Experience

If sorrow is the consequence of pattern spoiled, then the bird was grieving, seeking comfort in the patter and tap of the baby’s shoes against the wooden floor, Rolando whaling away like Billy Cobham with the heels of his little Air Jordans, working himself around the room on his back, a human dust mop making a knight’s tour of the emptied-out living room, brown eyes grooving with vacant fixity all the while on the red tail feather and black eyebead of the parrot, for whose care, removal, or ultimate disposition no instructions had been given to Rolando’s mother when she was directed to clear out the place by the executor of the Cochise Jones estate, a modest affair carefully depleted by sixty-plus years of foolishness, most of what remained of it tied up in vinyl records, the rest in vintage leisure suits (Aisha had counted twenty-two), the fatal Hammond, a Yamaha keyboard on a cross-legged metal stand, furniture fit only for the Ashby BART flea market, and the Antarctic architecture of Mr. Jones’s so-called files, towers and peaks and drifts of paper everywhere, which Aisha shoveled into cardboard banker boxes—gas bills, doctor bills, communications from Musicians Local 6, photos of people who meant nothing to Aisha, a photo of Mr. Jones at the front counter of his favorite haunt saying something that was making Archy Stallings smile his big slow smile, door-hanger menus, bank statements of the mid-nineties, medical and insurance documents, the yellowing ongoing history of Mr. Jones’s battles against record labels and their departments of legal affairs—before turning at last, with a sinking heart, to the parrot, Fifty-Eight, wordless during the whole time that Aisha had devoted to sorting out the old man’s belongings, the bird expressing itself only by emitting a throaty musical purr that put her in mind of the old Wurlitzer organ at her church, singing or playing—or neither or both—an instrumental version of a song you would hear on an oldies station, but it’s too late, baby, now, it’s too late, the parrot sounding like a funky church organ and making its musical selection, given the circumstances, with what seemed to be a disturbing sense of the apropos, the endless organ solo after a couple of hours kind of sort of starting to work on Aisha’s last nerve, the latter a strand of bodily tissue notorious among her friends and family for its thinness and stretched as well by her ADD-ass little son lying there on the rug kicking his ADD-ass little feet, and also by an eerie dead-old-man vibration troubling the air in the house, a smell of decrepitude and neglected houseplants, water drops hitting the bathtub from a leaky tap like a ticking clock, year after year of debts and depositions, old record albums, the elegiac smell of leisure suit, all of it starting to creep Aisha the fuck out, but at last she got everything tagged and bagged and boxed and, having buckled Rolando back into his

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