Michael Chabon: The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh

"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.

"I'm huge," he said, poking his finger into my chest. "I'll be back in ten minutes."

Kneading the damp pieces of metal in my hand, I watched him pass again through the shadows between streetlights, shrinking as he went. I wished, with sharp, strange regret, that I had kissed his cheek.

I stood with a quarter half-slid into the coin slot, my thoughts a jumble of preambles and strategies, having decided firmly but in some bewilderment that I could not call Uncle Lenny. It would have to be my father. I say bewilderment because I still did not really believe that the premature arrival of the police had anything to do with my father, and so I couldn't quite see why I should call him, except that I'd told Cleveland I would. It was intolerable enough to have to alarm my father for a good reason, but for more of Cleveland 's nonsense! I pinched the quarter, full of dread, wondering whether I shouldn't just call to say hello. I read fifteen times an obscene graffito on the aluminum corner of the phone booth.

"Collect call to Joseph Bechstein from Art, " I said, and in a minute I heard my father saying that he would not accept the charges. In the second before my heart sank, I felt how odd it was to hear his high, clipped familiar voice and not be able to speak to him, as though the operator had raised an unhearing ghost or oracle; this woman held the switches and wire that connected us. My father would hang up, and then I would, and she would be left wherever it is that operators are.

"Dad!" I said. "Please talk to me!"

I heard the sudden silence as the woman broke the connection; then, as she blandly suggested that I dial direct, I heard the sirens growing in the distance. I dropped the receiver with a loud clunk and ran back toward the parking lot. For a few seconds I saw his motorcycle, very far away, before it disappeared from view. He must have flown past the wrong street corner, past two cops in a car with a description and an APB. One, then two, three squad cars went red and glittering after him. For the next few minutes I jogged helplessly back and forth, hopped into the air, climbed the steps of the museum, trying to catch a glimpse, aware of nothing around me but ceaseless demonstrations of the Doppler effect. I knew so little what to do that it actually occurred to me to call the police.