Michael Chabon (27 page)

When he drew near the house, however, his mind cleared again, his heart hardened, and he began to apply himself to his task. There was a young oak five or six feet from the base of the concrete wall; he grabbed its lowest limb and yanked himself up, then inched forward along the limb until he was almost level with the wall’s lip. He studied the house that stood not sixty feet from his already damp forehead. The bough rocked under his weight. It was a great brick house, red and hung with ivy, two dozen windows in the back alone, three chimneys. Areola had chosen it, after their sightseeing tour a few days before, because there appeared to be no guard dogs. Perhaps their last adventure with the snarling bitch in the back of the truck had been a near disaster, or perhaps she was no longer in heat; in any case, they were for the moment unprepared to deal with Dobermans. Cleveland loved dogs, of course, and would never have employed the poisoned wiener.

All of the downstairs lights were on, all of the upper windows dark, as he’d hoped and expected—it was dinnertime, and Cleveland could see them, Dad, Mom, Junior, Sis, and Baby, sitting around the vast dining room table with their beautiful food, could see the uniformed maid disappear through swinging doors into the kitchen (glimpse of copper pots, flowery wallpaper), and he felt briefly wistful at the familiar sight of the father and the son, and the butter being passed in silence along the unbridgeable distance between them. He spat thick whiskey spit, then climbed out onto the top of the wall, squatting. He looked down along the wall’s inner face, to the grass by its foot, for signs that the perimeter was alarmed, though he knew that if there were an alarm system, it would not be activated, surely, at this hour of happiness and safety; but there were no such signs, and he let himself slowly down into the hostile territory of the well-groomed yard.

Shrub to shrub he went, avoiding the swaths of light from the windows, which gathered now in the twilight and fell across the grass; avoiding the dining room; trying to decide which of the still-dark upstairs windows was the master bedroom. Master bedroom, he thought. The phrase reminded him for some reason of Jane’s parents, and as he scanned the dozen upstairs windows he permitted himself to engage in deep fantasy for a second or two. With a fat enough wad of dough, he would buy thirty feet of chrome Airstream camper and set out across the Fatherland with Jane, culminating their voyage at Mount Rushmore, where they would surpass Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint by doing the holy deed in the chapel of Teddy Roosevelt’s right ear. There it was! down at the opposite end of the house from the dining room—two thin, tall windows, nearly doors, behind a rail of spiraling wrought iron, about ten feet off the ground. They would be opened every morning, no doubt, for the master’s deeply satisfying survey of his domain.

It was at this point that he began to wish he had a partner. Pete Areola had lost half a leg in a car accident six months before, and Cleveland, Areola said, was the first guy Poon had found who was even worth training. Punicki fenced only for the true artists and craftsmen of Pittsburgh jewel theft, of which there were perhaps four, or three. Now Cleveland needed someone to crouch and make a platform of his back, to lace hands together and give a boost. He ape-walked over to the dark window and stood beneath it, looking up.

As he took another pull from his flask, he noticed that the window directly in front of him was open. Hey. He stuck his head into a dim, empty room, library or study, big desk in the middle, on which burned a tiny lamp in the shape of a heron. The lamp threw its cold light just far enough for him to make out the thousand law books that lined the walls. He put on the gloves. As quietly as possible, he climbed into the library, which smelled of pipe, and then carried back out the thickest, largest books, the tomes. He intensely disliked cold, plutonian libraries like this one, and was actually glad to get outside again, to find himself at last rocking at the peak of the cairn of books, like Buster Keaton, with a firm grip on the wrought-iron rail. He pulled himself up.

Drawing the slender crowbar from his sleeve now, he forced the window in the patient, incremental, silent way that Pete had taught him; then he was inside the cool, perfumed, silent, black bedroom; panting, with a taste of fire in his mouth from the whiskey that jostled in his gut, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then went to Mom’s vanity and took the chair. He wedged it, softly, against the door, pushing in the lock button. The important part was also the easiest and swiftest. Some of the watches and bracelets were just lying around like pennies; feeling like the Grinch Who Stole Christmas, he swept them up, then went through the socks and panties in the antique dresser, the funereal jewel box, until he had himself two big handfuls of heirlooms and anniversary presents from the master.

Something to put them in—he thought of using a sock, but decided on a pillowcase or sheet, and tiptoed over to the bed. On the left-hand night table was another gold bracelet—snik!—and an old blond doll, the kind with eyes that close for doll-like sleep when the rubber baby is laid on her back. He grinned, pulled the head off with a rather disturbing soft pop, and poured all the jewelry into the hollow body. It took him a grisly minute to get the head screwed in again; then he shook the weird maraca once, and, unable to resist, rewarded himself with another pull from the flask—he was, after all, under a good deal of stress—and it was thus that mighty Cleveland made, at last, one too many fine, brilliant demonstrations of his mighty nonchalance. He should have deferred the moment of exultant glee, left just a little sooner. As he dropped down onto the lawn with a thud that was as quiet as he could manage, he heard the first call of the sirens.

At this point I should probably say that my father, since our last bizarre, miserable attempt at conversation, had entered into a state of rage that was reportedly terrible, biblical, in its fatherliness and bare restraint, in the fear and trembling it inspired. My father was wroth. Through Lenny Stern he let it be known that Frankie Breezy should call him at once, and when twenty minutes later Frankie did, he encouraged Frankie to see that Cleveland was Frankie’s responsibility. Frankie could see that. What did Frankie Breezy, feeling perhaps a bit numb as he hung up the phone, imagine could be the reason for Joe the Egg’s sudden malignant interest in Frankie’s old pickup and delivery boy, a stupid motorhead? He would have known what everybody else knew, that ever since his wife got dead, Joe Bechstein had been funny about his boy. Now the boy had ended up down in the dirt playing with the rest of the boys, and Joe the Egg was crying about it. He’d told Frankie to teach Cleveland a lesson, but Frankie probably smirked when he heard this, guessing for whom the lesson was really intended.

He had no reason not to want to do it, either, since Punicki was currently his least favorite person in the whole world. He sent a few ears out into the street. It took very little time to get wind of the Fox Chapel job; and an anonymous phone call at sunset, with a guess at the general address, did the trick neatly. The cops came screaming into the neighborhood, and Cleveland, making a lot of noise, which alerted the Master, tossed the doll over the wall, then scrambled up after it. He heard the rip of the seam at the shoulder of his jacket. Through the woods he crashed, with Baby under his arm, losing his way twice. He imagined the scene back at the house, the crying children, Dad rushing out into the yard, Junior into the street. Police, Police! A branch jammed into his cheek, near the eye, and he saw a flash of red. At last he pounded out onto the blacktop of the deserted parking lot, started his bike, and took off.

It was as he pulled out onto the road, turned unthinkingly to the right, that he realized two things: He didn’t know where he was going, and he’d had too much to drink. The alcohol had deserted him during his run through the woods, but now it returned, with all the rancor of an I-told-you-so, and he swung around in the road and started off in the other direction, back toward Highland Park, unable to decide what to do next, since it was too early to go around to Carl’s store; anyway, he was supposed to pick up Pete beforehand, in Oakland. As he considered running a stop sign and slowed to a near halt, it occurred to him that more than just the police might be looking for him; and he thought of me, because he had a vague, wild idea that I might be able to say something to someone and take some of the heat off, if heat there was; then he thought of Jane, of that safe, other, tender world, and wondered if he could risk returning to her house, where he had not been now for two months.

He roared past two police cars headed in the opposite direction, heard their distant squeals as they whirled around and gave chase. The doll still under his arm, he crossed the Allegheny, determined to lose his pursuers. Ten minutes later he stood astride his motorcycle in an empty East Liberty parking lot, behind a cluster of old buildings that hid him from the street, loading docks on three sides of him, empty crates, a forkless forklift. On the fourth side there were a small office trailer and an illuminated pay phone rising up from a patch of weeds. He drained the last draft from his flask, then dug a quarter out of his pocket.

“Cleveland!”

“What are you doing, Bechstein?” he said. “Drop everything.”

I’d been lying on the sofa, trying to read an essay analyzing the notorious transience of the Clash’s drummers, and of drummers in general, but I was continually distracted by the thought that I had no plans at all for the evening, and that I’d had no plans at all since the previous Friday, an evening with Phlox, which I’d destroyed by failing to conceal from her my new, terrifying inability to attend to her speech or body; there’d already been a more subdued but similar evening with Arthur, and I was beginning to doubt that I now had sexual feelings at all, of any prefix. I didn’t know whether my lack of plans was blessing or pain. The ambiguous note on which I’d last parted with Cleveland—scrapping on the steps of my house—seemed insignificant now, small-time ambiguity, and his call promised salvation.

“Where are you?” I said. “What’s up?”

“How soon can you be at the Cloud Factory, Bechstein?”

“Twenty minutes? Five if I make a bus. What? What?”

“Just come on.”

“To do what?”

“I need to crawl beneath your aegis,” he said, dryly. “Just come on.”

“You’re liquored,” I said.

“Fuck, Bechstein, just come on. This is your big chance.” Faint thrill of pleading in his voice. “Just come.”

“It isn’t Crime?”

“I’m coming to get you,” he said. “Stay put.” There was a lot of noise and rattle as he hung up the phone.

I shaved and, on an odd impulse, changed into the clothes I considered my battle dress—as close as I came to battle dress, that is—jeans, black pocket T-shirt, high-top black sneakers, then stood in front of the mirror lamenting my feebleness, trying to narrow my mouth, harden my gaze, while laughing. I felt giddy, anxious, and what once was called gay, assuming that I was in for the same taste of fear, illumination, and strange liberty I’d found in our two previous rounds of Crime. I ran out to Forbes Avenue to wait for him, and my first disappointment came when I saw that I’d dressed all wrong. Cleveland, in his blazer, looked ready to eat an obligatory luncheon with a lonely old aunt. I looked ready to vandalize her house and steal her bird feeders. We’d exchanged our usual uniforms. He lifted his visor; I saw the fiery red mark on his cheek, below the eye.

“Look at you. Ha.” He smiled for half a second. “Get on.”

I got on, afraid to ask about the doll, put my arms around him, held on tightly; something was very definitely the matter here; I sensed the fatalistic bluntness of Cleveland’s speech. His ever present alcoholic aura of having gone to far was now a rank smell around him.

“Your father is an asshole,” he began, and then told me, quickly, shouting into the wind, what he’d been doing for the past two hours, and from whom he imagined he was running.

“Why would my father care?” I shouted. “You’re paranoid. Why would he care what you do for Carl Punicki?”

He slowed as we turned into Schenley Park, and the wind died for an instant. “Because he’s an asshole! Because, hell, because I corrupted your youth. I don’t know. I took you out to the stockyard behind the family hot dog stand. God knows there’s a lot more you could stand to find out. It would probably kill him.”

I didn’t answer. We came upon the Cloud Factory, dim in the streetlight, and had just begun to pass it, when there was the hint of a police car in the distance, by the library. We both saw it. He swerved into the museum parking lot, by the cafeteria door, and cut the engine.

“We’ll wait here for a second,” he said, craning his head around toward me, so that I caught a full whiskey blast. “I want you to stick with me for a while, okay, Bechstein, please?” He was opposed on principle, I knew, to the word “please.” “Just be my rabbit foot.”

The police car passed, a bit slowly, but passed, and the shadows of the cops within it seemed serene and unpursuing. I exhaled.

“Okay,” I said, free from doubt for the first time in four days. I clutched his shoulder as kindly as a shoulder may be clutched. “I will. What’s with the doll?”

He shook it.

“I see,” I said. Actually, I would have loved to see. Stolen jewels. Who is not stirred by these two words?

“Just a minute,” he said, sliding off the bike. He started toward the Cloud Factory with the doll.

I watched him disappear down the hill. It had never occurred to me that my success at remaining aloof from the business of my family all that time might be the fruit of my father’s will as much as my own. I’d always thought I disappointed him by my shame, my lack of interest, my adolescent scorn. And then I thought: Wait a minute, am I going to get arrested? Hold everything.

“What’d you do with it?” I said, when Cleveland strolled easily back, patting the pockets of his too-small jacket. “Did anyone see you?”

“No evidence on me n-now,” he said, sounding frazzled, a bit winded. “No one saw. May the Cloud Factory bless and k-keep my little baby. Now listen. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve got to run over to Ward Street to gather up my mentor. I’ll get his truck—he has a beautiful truck—and we’ll be back for you.”