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, Bech-stein?'
'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 unpursu-ing. 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.'
'Why do I have to wait here?'
He grabbed my elbow with one hand, my upper arm with the other, and lifted me into the air, about four inches off the saddle. It hurt.
'Off,' he said, dragging me brusquely onto my feet. To an observer it would have looked as though he were about to beat me up. 'You're staying here because you're going to be very busy while I'm gone.' He reached into his trousers pocket and drew out a half-dozen quarters. 'Here,' he said. 'Start calling all the magic names you know. All the wise guys. Your Uncle Lenny, whoever. Ask them-with all the filial humility you're so good at-to lay off. As a favor to you.'
'I don't know any wise guys, Cleveland. I can't call Uncle Lenny.'
He climbed onto the BMW, pulled on his helmet. His voice came distant and nasal through the lowered visor, as though he were talking to me from inside a bottle.
'Sure you can,' he said. 'Call your dad, if you have to.' He jumped down hard on the starter, and his drunken foot slipped, pounded on the ground. 'Jesus. Call collect.'
'This is not a good scheme, Cleveland. This is a bad scheme. You can't even start your motorcycle. ' I saw that I was trying to welsh on my promise to help him, so I grinned. 'You're impaired.'
He jumped again, and the bike began its controlled explosions.
