Michael Chabon

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.”